“Let’s talk to customers” can mean four different things, and they cost the customer different amounts of time. Picking the right one is most of the work. Here is how we sort them.
Interview
One customer, one or two people from your team, 30 to 60 minutes on a call.
Run one when you need to understand how a specific person does a specific thing: how their team closes the quarter, what happened in their first week on your product, why they built a workaround. The detail only comes out one to one.
The invitation should name the topic and the length, and say who from your team will be there. Bring four or five questions, not fifteen. Let the customer go off the agenda; that is usually where the useful part is.
You get back notes with time markers, attendance, and the recording if Zoom is connected. Send the recap to the one person, and thank them by name in it.
Workshop
Four to ten customers and your team, 60 to 90 minutes, with something to work on.
Run one when you have options and need to choose between them: three onboarding directions, two ways to lay out the approvals inbox. Everyone in the room should have a stake in the outcome, so invite from the segment the decision affects, not the whole community.
The invitation should say what the group will decide and how many seats there are. A visible seat count gets faster replies. Structure the call so the group makes something in the second half, a ranking, a sketch, a sentence they agree on. Reactions in the first half are useful; the artifact in the second half is what your team acts on.
You get back the notes, who showed up and who dropped early, the recording, and the artifact. The recap should say what the group decided and what your team is taking forward.
Town hall
Open to every member, 45 to 60 minutes, your team presenting.
Run one when everyone should hear the same thing at the same time: the roadmap, what shipped and what slipped, a change that affects every account. It is the only session where your team talks more than the members do, and that is fine as long as the questions at the end are answered plainly.
Do not use a town hall to collect input. Thirty people cannot give you input in an hour. They can tell you where the plan is wrong, which is a different and useful thing.
The invitation goes to the whole community, no seat limit. You get back attendance across the community, the questions asked, and the recording. Post the recap in the discussion thread so the questions can carry on.
Concept review
No call. A mockup, a short video, or a written proposal, plus three or four prompts, open for a few days.
Run one when the artifact can speak for itself and you want a read from many people rather than depth from one. Members answer on their own time, which is why this is the session with the highest response rate and the one most teams underuse.
Keep the prompts to four. Make the first one “Which one, and why?” Mark one as required and leave the rest optional. Say how long it takes in the invitation; ten minutes is honest for four prompts.
You get back every answer grouped by prompt, who opened it and who finished, and the themes across the responses. The recap goes out when the window closes.
Picking
If you need depth from one person, interview. If there is a decision at the end, workshop. If everyone needs to hear it, town hall. If a member could answer alone with the thing in front of them, concept review.
When you are not sure, run the smaller one. It is easier to add a workshop after three interviews than to get ten people back after a workshop that did not need them.