Best Practices for Recording Interviews
Ask Permission
There are two points you should touch on:
1. Recording the interview means you will be able to engage in the conversation, rather than being focused on note-taking.
Example: "Would you mind if I record this, so that I may focus on the conversation and not on notes?"
2. You respect their privacy and give them power to opt out.
Example: "If there is anything you would like to say off the record, I can press pause on the recorder. In addition, if at the end of the interview if you have changed your mind, I can delete the audio."
Why Record Interviews?
Recording customer interviews allows you to reflect on your interviewing skills and observe your strengths and weaknesses. This helps you quickly develop your interviewing skills as you analyze and critique your own customer interactions.
When you reflect on your interviews, you observe your strengths and weaknesses. By doing this, you'll be improving your skills as you analyze and critique them.
Recording allows you to focus on the conversation with the customer, not on note taking. When you record the interview you are free to focus on the discussion without the distraction of capturing it. If you want notes to be taken, you can ask a team member to be a designated note-taker for the conversation.
It provides a much higher fidelity artifact of the conversation. Even the best notes don't capture every word and intonation, or the subtleties of a human conversation.
Recording allows you to reflect on the conversation at a later date. Have you ever watched a movie a second time and gotten a new level of understanding that you initially missed? The same is true of listening to conversations with your customers. We miss things in the moment, we're thinking about our next question, analyzing what's being said. There's a lot going on that can be missed and unless you record it you won't know what important information you've lost.
When the conversation is being recorded you can focus your note taking on the insights you gain, instead of trying to capture the content. This allows you to take less notes and relax knowing that nothing is being lost.
It allows you to transcribe the conversation in the Discovery Platform™. Our SmartTranscript™ technology synchronizes the text of the transcript with the audio at the word level. This allows you to search and navigate the audio via the textual transcript. If you've ever tried to review an audio conversation using a slider to navigate the playback location you'll appreciate the value of simply searching for a keyword, selecting the text and hearing exactly what was said. The combination of having text and audio synchronized together makes audio review of interviews much faster and easier.
It allows the entire team to listen to the voice of the customer, provide feedback and create insights. The benefits of understanding your customers needs is most effective in a collaborative team environment. Having all your interview recordings in the system makes it easy to adopt a collaborative workflow where all team members are included in the process.
These points remind interviewees that you aren't after confidential or sensitive information and have their best interests in mind.
Our automatic speech recognition software supports the following audio file types:
MP3, MP4, AAC, WAV, and WMA
Our in-app audio recording is relatively limitless though it only picks up the mic, no other computer audio.
- On Chrome, Firefox, and Safari audio recordings can be several hours long, giving you plenty of time to conduct your interviews.
- On Edge, audio recordings are limited by the browser to approximately 15 minutes.