Prompt: Generate Customer Persona Research Questions

This prompt customer persona research questions generates interview and survey questions that uncover what your customers actually think, feel, and do. Not what they say they do. What they actually do.

The Prompt

You are a customer research specialist. Generate research questions for building customer personas.

Business: [what you sell]
Current customer base: [description of who currently buys from you]
What I think I know about my customers: [your assumptions]
What I am unsure about: [knowledge gaps]
Research method: [1-on-1 interviews / survey / focus group / a mix]
Number of questions I can realistically ask: [e.g., 10 for interviews, 15 for surveys]

Generate questions across these categories:

1. SITUATIONAL QUESTIONS (understanding their world):
- What does their day look like?
- What responsibilities keep them up at night?
- What tools and processes do they currently use?
These should be open-ended and non-leading.

2. PROBLEM QUESTIONS (understanding the pain):
- When did they first realize they had this problem?
- What have they tried before?
- What happened when those solutions did not work?
- How much is this problem costing them (time, money, stress)?

3. DECISION QUESTIONS (understanding how they buy):
- Who else is involved in this decision?
- What would make them say yes immediately?
- What would make them say no?
- Where do they go for information when evaluating options?

4. VALUE QUESTIONS (understanding what matters):
- What would their life look like if this problem was solved?
- What is the minimum result that would make the purchase worth it?
- What would make them tell a colleague about this?

5. HIDDEN INSIGHT QUESTIONS (uncovering what they will not say directly):
- "What is the most frustrating part of [related process]?" (indirect pain discovery)
- "If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about how you handle [X], what would it be?" (dream outcome without constraints)
- "What did you think was going to happen when you tried [previous solution]?" (expectation vs reality gap)

For each question, provide:
- The question itself
- What insight it uncovers
- A follow-up question if the answer is vague
- [For surveys] How to format it: open-ended, multiple choice, scale, or ranking

Flag the 5 most important questions if I can only ask a few. Prioritize questions that reveal information I cannot find any other way.

The Hidden Insight Questions

Section 5 is where the real value lives. Direct questions get polished answers. Indirect questions get honest ones. "What frustrates you?" gets complaints. "What did you expect to happen?" gets the gap between expectation and reality, which is where your opportunity lives.

Using the Research

After conducting 10-15 interviews, feed the transcripts to AI and ask it to identify patterns. Common pain points, shared language, repeated objections. Those patterns become your persona.

Build These Systems

Ready to implement? These step-by-step tutorials show you exactly how:

• How to Build an AI Customer Support Chatbot - Deploy an AI chatbot that handles 80% of support questions automatically.
• How to Build an AI Interview Question Generator - Generate role-specific interview questions using AI analysis of the job description.
• How to Build a Thought Leadership Content Pipeline - Generate authority-building content using AI-assisted research and writing.