By Kent Lowry and Michele McDanel
“Never miss an opportunity to stay quiet.” – Eartha Kitt
Silence.
Our minds are accustomed to non-stop noise, from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep (and perhaps even while we are sleeping). We simply aren’t accustomed to silence and don’t tend to embrace it as part of most of our social interactions.
Especially when you’re speaking face-to-face with someone – when the focus of the moment is to interact verbally – even a short pause in the conversation can feel strange and uncomfortable.
But for a Researcher meeting with a customer – even for almost any one-on-one conversation – silence is a useful tool. When Researchers give customers space to talk, to talk some more, and to consider what they’ve just said, we can get insights beyond what we might think to ask about.
Think of silence within a conversation as a tool for further discovery.
The science of silence
Research has shown that, in the United States, it takes only four seconds before silence becomes uncomfortable during conversation.
When we encounter a moment of silence, our innate discomfort can cause us to estimate the time as much longer than it was. If you can become comfortable with silence, you can make effective use of it, allowing the customer to fill the gap. Silence gets you and your preconceived notions out of the way and creates a space that your customer can use to follow their train of thought and fill in with their ideas.
Think of a customer interview as an effort to peel an onion, where only the customer knows what’s at the next layer and how to get there: If you talk or interrupt too much, you might never get past the first layer or two. Silence will help get you to the core of understanding, to the next thing the customer will think of, to something you don’t even know exists.
Tip: What to do during silence? Maintain eye contact.
Wait patiently with relaxed body language.
If you feel that you must do something to occupy yourself, take a sip of water.
By listening and not speaking, you can discover things that may dramatically change the course of your interview or reveal details you might not have had the opportunity to learn.
Tip: Thinking about the four second information we shared above, try counting to seven
to encourage the participant into filling the silence.
The awkwardness will be heightened in the first four seconds;
then the participant can use the next three seconds to collect their thoughts before they speak.
Listening effectively
When we’re in a conversation and the other person is speaking, many of us spend that time thinking of our next comment or question and waiting for our turn to speak, rather than listening to absorb and understand what’s being said. By demonstrating with silence and appropriate body language that you are truly listening, you can build connection and trust with a customer.
Listening and being silent also prevents you from interrupting a customer’s train of thought or influencing their behavior. For example, a customer may ask a question like, “What should I do now?” or “What’s that button for?” but those are questions that you want the customer to answer for themselves. Let them answer their own questions. Resist the urge to answer rhetorical questions or questions where the customer is thinking aloud. If you feel the need to prompt, you could say something like, “What do you think?” or “How would you handle that?”
Tip: If you can’t resist thinking about what you want to say when listening, focus instead specifically on being silent.
By concentrating entirely on what’s being shared with you, you will have a new skill AND new knowledge.
You appear as — and truly ARE — in control when your first response upon hearing or seeing something that inspires a strong reaction isn’t to respond in any way, but instead to become silent. And you especially want to embrace silence – and listen without reacting or in any way appearing defensive – when a customer picks apart any of your ideas or designs.
Tip: If the feedback is negative about something you’ve created, resist the urge to defend or explain.
When it is time that you should speak, say something like, “That is great feedback. Can you tell me more?”
The importance of validation
Silence paired with non-verbal cues that you are listening (such as eye contact) shows interest. It is a gift to the person we’re listening to. We know that people enjoy feeling validated, seen, and heard (and probably don’t experience that enough). By employing silence, you give them the space needed for that to happen. Don’t underestimate how valuable this is to customers who may have long-held frustrations about a product, or on the flip side, may want to wax poetic about what they love and why!
In workshops that we have done with designers, program managers, engineers, and data scientists, we have participants practice being silent. In one exercise, we have participants pair up and ask one person to share something about themselves for five minutes, while the other person stays completely silent. This can be very difficult to do (to talk nonstop for five minutes or to be quiet that whole time) but it ends up being quite enlightening. On the listening side, participants have told us how they learned things they wouldn’t have if they had interrupted to ask questions. On the speaking side, participants have told us about feeling truly heard and being surprised with what they ended up sharing. And on both sides of that “conversation” we’ve heard feedback that people feel more connected.
We should note that there are differences in comfort with silence among various cultures. The same study mentioned in the beginning of this article found that, while US speakers became uncomfortable with silence after just 4 seconds, Japanese speakers were comfortable with silence that was twice that long (8.2 seconds). A similar study found that Finnish speakers are also more comfortable with silence due to the high value attributed to privacy in that culture. However, being heard is one of the deepest human needs, and this is true across all cultures. Silence is necessary for one to be heard.
Tip: Too much silence in an interview can sometimes go wrong. If you sense that a participant has become upset or agitated,
it’s OK to help them along with questions such as “What do you think?”
or neutral responses, such as “What are you looking for?”
When it is time to ask questions, try to stick open-ended ones
and allow enough time for people to respond thoroughly.
Perhaps the most compelling argument for silence is that when customers take the time to talk with you, they deserve your complete attention. As important as quantitative data is for a product team, truly listening face-to-face is what can provide valuable insights into a customer’s emotions and relationship to a product. But you won’t be able to hear them unless you create the silent space for them to be voiced.
What do you think? How can these tips about using silence to gain greater understanding help you? What would you add? Tweet us your thoughts at @MicrosoftRI or follow us on Facebook and join the conversation.
Kent Lowry is a Principal Product Planner and Customer-Driven change agent at Microsoft. As a Product Planner, he drives formative and evaluative research to inform product strategy, and he also has a role driving culture change to inculcate customer-driven attitudes and behaviors within the engineering culture at Microsoft. Kent is adept at identifying the nexus of human needs with tech solutions.
Michele McDanel is a builder, an organizer, and a storyteller with a bachelor’s degree in Communications and an MBA. She is energized by solving problems and meeting business needs through communications and customer experience solutions that raise the bar. Michele enjoys building relationships and managing teams; and overall, just figuring out what the “special sauce” is that will be the competitive differentiator for a business and its solutions. She joined the Customer Insights Research team in 2019 to amplify the great UX research and data science work they do, and to showcase the thought leadership of the team across internal and external communications, events, and social media.
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