Why You Should Record a “Jobs to be Done” Interview

Marketing isn’t just about advertising a product or service’s basic features—at least good marketing isn’t. The marketing that really hits home with consumers is the kind that goes beyond this to delve into the core customer needs that are being fulfilled. Knowing the ins and outs of these needs (and in turn, how to play them up) is what can set you above the noise from all your competitors. Now the question is, “How exactly do you figure this out?’ The answer lies in four letters: “JTBD” or “Jobs to be Done.” Here are a few things about this strategy that we learned while marketing our best iPhone Call recorder app.

Conduct Product Research with Jobs to be Done User Interviews

“Jobs to be Done” is a method for understanding what motivates someone to use the product or service you’re selling. To learn this, you don’t need guesswork. All you have to do is ask—through a Jobs to be Done interview to be exact.

During such an interview, you can get right to the heart of the matter and ask users not only what task they were able to accomplish with the help of your product or service, but also how it improved their life.

These are just a few Jobs to be Done example questions you might ask during a user interview:

·      When did you first realize that [blank] was a problem? What happened?

·      When did you start actively looking for a solution?

·      What other solutions did you try before getting our product/service?

·      What made you decide to buy our product/service?

·      Were you worried about anything with using our product/service? If so, what?

Let’s look at what you might find through questions like these with a more specific example: Pretend you’re marketing an app that tells people the coolest events happening in their city that same day. During a Jobs to be Done interview with a user, you might hear that the app allowed them to quickly find activities they like without having to spend hours searching online. Going off of that idea, you might then uncover that because of this, they were able to join a close community of like-minded people in their city faster than they would have otherwise. Building your marketing around a message of community, bonding, and pursuing a passion, is a lot more likely to resonate with people than simply saying, “Hey, use our app and you won’t have to Google things as much!”

While you’re likely to get the most helpful information from relatively new customers with the subject fresh in their minds, you don’t have to use the Jobs to be Done approach only during the initial stages of putting your product or service on the scene. You can continue to use it throughout your product research process while you plan how you’re going to expand your offerings, such as what features to add or what updates to make. You could even use it with customers who no longer use your product or service since it could give you insight into the task your product/service isn’t helping them with anymore, which may show how you’re missing the mark.

Save User Research with a Call Recorder App

Yes, conducting user research like this takes time, but since it can direct your whole marketing strategy, it’s also incredibly valuable. Because of this time investment and potential worth, you definitely don’t want to risk losing the information, or even misinterpreting it because you haven’t recorded it properly. Rather than just hoping your memory is good enough or scrambling to scribble down notes as your user explains their experience, you can let a call recorder do all the work for you.

CallTap is the best call recorder app that conveniently works right through your iPhone. During your Jobs to be Done interviews, you can rest easy knowing that CallTap is recording everything so you can focus on asking the user the right questions and take more time to parse out conclusions when you review the recordings later on. Even better, there’s no limit to the recordings you can make so you can keep on gathering more and more nuggets of important information from more and more users.

Using a Call Recorder to Improve Your User Interview Technique

Aside from what you hear from the user, using a call recorder during a Jobs to be Done Interview also gives you the chance to see how you’re doing as an interviewer. You’ll be able to take a step back and see what questions you asked gave you the most valuable answers or what kind of approach made the interviewee feel the most comfortable. Maybe one slight word change made all the difference. Maybe you need to tweak the tone of your voice to help interviewees open up more. As you begin mastering Jobs to be Done interviews by becoming a better interviewer, it’ll only help you get better insights.

After all, if you’re going to build your business on this insight, what better way to make sure the insight is solid than using a phone recording app to have the actual recordings of your user interviews in hand.