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Start with the product decision you need to make
Write down the uncertainty behind the research before drafting questions. For example: “Why do new customers abandon setup before connecting their first data source?” is a research problem. “Would you use our redesigned setup wizard?” presumes a solution and invites a reaction to it.
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Check what the organization already knows: previous research, support issues, survey responses, feature requests, and behavioral data. This helps you avoid asking customers to repeat what the team can already learn from existing evidence, and it can reveal which parts of the problem still need explanation. Salesforce’s UX research guidance recommends defining the problem, reviewing prior research, and planning around the product and development timeline (Salesforce Trailhead: Define Your Research Plan).
Choose a method that fits the uncertainty
Interviews are useful when you need detailed explanations of individual experiences. They are not automatically the best way to estimate how common a behavior is across a large customer base. Salesforce’s method descriptions distinguish interviews from surveys, contextual inquiry, and focus groups:
#1 Best Overall
| Method | Best suited to | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Survey | Collecting responses broadly across a group | Can reach more respondents, but generally gives less depth about the circumstances behind an answer. |
| Individual interview | Understanding one person’s detailed account, reasoning, and experience | Offers depth, but requires time to conduct and analyze each conversation. |
| Contextual inquiry | Observing a person in the environment where the relevant activity happens | Adds behavioral context, but requires access to the participant’s setting. |
| Focus group | Observing similarities and differences in responses during group discussion | Shows how people respond to one another, rather than providing only one-to-one accounts. |
These are complementary methods, not interchangeable evidence. A survey may show how often a reported problem appears; an interview can help explain what happens when it does.
Recruit people who can illuminate the job
Recruit based on the behavior or experience in your research question, rather than convenience alone. Depending on the question, useful participants may include active users, lapsed customers, noncustomers, or employees who handle the relevant process. Consider which customer segments matter to the product decision and include the range of experiences needed to understand them. Salesforce’s research guidance emphasizes selecting participants relevant to the research and accounting for diversity across important segments (Define Your Research Plan; Empathetic Research for Customer Understanding).
Keep the study’s limits in view: interviews provide accounts from the people you spoke with, not a statistical estimate of every customer’s experience. Salesforce Trailhead’s Jobs to Be Done lesson offers five people as a starting suggestion for interviews; that is a practical recommendation, not proof that five participants represent a market or reveal the frequency of a problem (Understanding User Jobs & Needs).
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Make a short research plan that records the scope, problem, existing evidence, timeline, recruitment list, and methods. Salesforce Trailhead gives 30–90 minutes as a planning range for interviews; it is guidance, not a universal interview duration or requirement (Define Your Research Plan).
Use a consistent goal and core questions across participants so you can compare accounts. Leave room for follow-ups that explore the specific situation a person describes. The aim is to understand what they did and why—not to get approval for a feature idea. Salesforce Trailhead summarizes the approach: “Ask how and why questions to gain deeper insights into customer behaviors” (Understanding User Jobs & Needs).
Prompts that invite concrete examples
- “Tell me about the last time you tried to do [the relevant task]. What happened first?”
- “What were you trying to accomplish?”
- “What did you do when that step did not work as expected?”
- “What tools, workarounds, or other people did you rely on?”
- “What made that part easy or difficult?”
- “What happened next, and how did you decide what to do?”
Follow the participant’s account with neutral questions such as “What do you mean by that?” or “Can you walk me through what happened?” Avoid leading questions and yes-or-no prompts when your goal is discovery. If you show a solution concept, do so only when the study is meant to evaluate that concept; introducing it too early can steer the conversation away from current behavior.
Capture the account without losing its context
Record what the participant did, the circumstances in which it happened, and the words they used. A short quotation without its context can be misleading: preserve what task was underway, what obstacle arose, and what the person did next. A note-taker or audio memo tool can help retain details, but ask for the participant’s approval before recording. Salesforce Trailhead recommends accurate notes and direct quotes, and its empathy-research guidance also stresses recording with approval (Understanding User Jobs & Needs; Empathetic Research for Customer Understanding).
Keep notes or transcripts traceable to the participant and interview context using the organization’s established research practices. Do not treat a memorable quote as a finding by itself; it is evidence to interpret alongside the rest of that person’s account and other participants’ accounts.
Analyze the interviews for patterns, not just memorable quotes
After the conversations, compare accounts against the same research question. Look for recurring jobs people are trying to complete, barriers, workarounds, frustrations, and functional or emotional goals. Note whether an apparent theme occurs across different participants or is specific to one person or segment.
Rank #4
- Review each account in context. Read notes or approved transcripts alongside the original research question. Preserve the sequence of events, not just isolated comments.
- Mark evidence relevant to the question. Identify descriptions of goals, actions, decisions, obstacles, workarounds, and outcomes. Keep direct quotes attached to the surrounding context.
- Compare across participants. Group similar needs or obstacles, while retaining differences by segment or circumstance. A repeated workaround may indicate a recurring gap; one participant’s preference should not be presented as a universal need.
- Separate observation from interpretation. Label what people said or did separately from the team’s explanation of why it happened. If accounts conflict or evidence is thin, keep that uncertainty visible.
- Connect the pattern to a decision. State what the evidence may mean for the product, what remains unknown, and what follow-up could validate the interpretation.
Consistent questions and a shared research goal make accounts easier to compare. Salesforce Trailhead supports documenting research questions and a results summary for future work; the specific format above is a practical synthesis approach, not a Salesforce-prescribed template (Define Your Research Plan; Understanding User Jobs & Needs).
Example: turning a comment into a product insight
Suppose several participants describe stopping during account setup because they cannot tell which permissions are required, and say they ask a colleague to help. The raw evidence is their accounts of the confusing permission step and the colleague workaround. A possible insight is that the setup flow does not make the permission decision understandable to those users. The product implication might be to investigate clearer explanations or in-flow guidance. That is a hypothesis to take to the team—not proof that a particular redesign will work, or evidence that all customers encounter the same issue.
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Share evidence in a form product teams can use
Present a small, decision-relevant set of themes rather than a transcript dump. For each theme, state the affected participants or segments, the supporting observations or quotes, the product implication, and any unanswered question. Keep quotations representative and traceable to their context; avoid implying prevalence unless the study design supports it.
Bring the people responsible for product and development decisions into the discussion. They need to see both what the interviews suggest and what they do not establish. The next step could be a product change, a targeted follow-up study, a survey to assess breadth, or further investigation of existing behavioral or support data.
Where Salesforce fits in the workflow
Salesforce can complement qualitative interviews through feedback collection and analytics. The capabilities described in Salesforce documentation concern surveys and configured feedback channels; they are not evidence of automatic, validated qualitative synthesis from any interview recording.
| Salesforce capability | What the cited documentation describes | Conditions to check |
|---|---|---|
| Surveys and Feedback Management | Collect survey feedback, map responses to customer records, export data, report, and build dashboards; Feedback Management can integrate feedback with Salesforce data. | Availability depends on the organization’s edition and licenses. Confirm the current entitlement for the specific org. Salesforce Feedback Management |
| Product Insights | Dashboard reporting for product-specific engagement, response counts, sentiment and positive or negative influencing factors, contact reasons, and sentiment by location. It can trend CSAT, NPS, and sentiment, with filters for region, product family, product, channel, and period. | Salesforce lists Lightning Experience and additional-cost or Customer Signals Intelligence conditions, as well as separate survey licensing conditions. Check the exact requirements for the org. Product Insights |
| Customer Signals Intelligence | For configured channels, Salesforce describes insight types including contact reason, targeted sentiment, sentiment, entity extraction, key phrases, and product insights extraction. | Supported channels, editions, licenses, transcript-sharing setup, data selection, and Flex-credit consumption can affect availability and use. Set Up Standard Channels in Customer Signals Intelligence |
Salesforce describes standard Customer Signals Intelligence channels such as cases, email, surveys, chat, and voice, subject to configuration and eligibility (Set Up Standard Channels in Customer Signals Intelligence). Those capabilities may help teams examine feedback that has been collected through supported channels, but they should not be conflated with interviewing customers and interpreting qualitative accounts.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchThe reviewed Salesforce product pages do not establish that a researcher can upload any interview recording and automatically receive validated themes or roadmap recommendations. Keep the interpretation grounded in human review unless current documentation for the exact Salesforce workflow confirms otherwise.
Close the feedback loop
Research is more useful when it leads to a decision and, where appropriate, a response to customers. Decide what action follows from the findings, assign ownership, and let participants know what changed when that is suitable. Salesforce describes its feedback loop as four stages: Ask, Categorize, Act, and Follow Up (Customer Feedback: A Guide for Collecting, Analyzing & Actioning, published August 24, 2026).
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