AltF IdeaLab

Customer interview questions

The customer interview tool builds a five-stage problem interview script from your audience and problem, focused on what people did last time rather than what they might do. A checker flags questions that tend to get unreliable answers: hypothetical, future, leading, pitch, price and yes/no phrasing. The checker matches wording patterns, so it can miss a biased question phrased in an unusual way.

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Idea (1)

Name and one-line pitch

Customer interview script

Questions about past behaviour, built from your audience and problem. Keep your solution out of it until the last minute.

Who you are interviewing

Problem to explore

Part 1 · Warm up
- Tell me about your role and what a normal week looks like for you.
- What are the most time-consuming parts of that week?
Part 2 · The last time it happened
- When was the last time you ran into this problem?
- Walk me through exactly what happened, step by step.
- What did it cost you: time, money, a missed deadline, a customer?
Part 3 · Current workaround
- What do you do about it today?
- What have you already tried that did not work, and why did you stop?
- Do you pay for anything to help with this? Roughly how much?
Part 4 · Priority
- Where does this rank against the other problems you deal with?
- Who else is involved when this happens, and who decides on fixing it?
Part 5 · Close
- Is there anything I should have asked but did not?
- Who else should I talk to about this?
- Can I follow up if I build something that helps?

Question checker

Type one of your own questions to catch hypothetical, leading or pitching phrasing.

Autosaved in this browser only. Nothing is sent to AltFTool.

How to use the customer interview questions

1
Describe the audience and problem
Enter who you are interviewing and the problem in a few words; both are inserted into the script.
2
Use the five-stage script
Work through warm up, the last time it happened, current workaround, priority and close.
3
Check your own questions
Paste any question you plan to ask and read the flags for wording that invites polite or guessed answers.
4
Record what you heard
Feed the results back into the scorecard, for example how many people raised the problem unprompted.

How it works

The script has five stages and 13 questions: warm up, the last time it happened, current workaround, priority and close.
Hypothetical: phrases like "would you", "imagine" or "if we built".
Future: "will you", "are you going to", "in the future". Leading: "don't you think", "isn't it", "wouldn't it be", "right?".
Pitch: mentions of "our app", "my product", "we are building" and similar. Price: "how much would you pay", "would you pay".
Yes/no: questions that start with do, does, did, is, are, was, were, have, has, can or should.

Worked example: checking four questions

"Would you pay for our app?" is flagged three times: hypothetical, pitch and price.

"Do you hate chasing invoices?" is flagged as yes/no.

"Isn't it annoying when clients pay late?" is flagged as leading.

"Tell me about the last time a client paid late." gets no flags, because it asks for a real past event.

What the customer interview questions does not do

The checker uses fixed wording patterns, not language understanding, so it can miss bias and occasionally flag a fine question.
It is built for English questions.
A clean script does not replace listening; follow-up questions in the conversation matter most.