The Cost of No-Shows in Customer/User Interviews

Picture this: you're sitting in a empty Zoom for 5 minutes, waiting for your discovery participant to dial-in. You ping them. A few more minutes pass, and finally you decide to bail.

The dreaded "no-show" problem!

Did that just cost 10 minutes? Or much more?

Any team running customer interviews knows that participants don't always show up. But no-shows are not just a nuisance. They're a costly – often overlooked – expense for both the interviewer and their company.

In this post, we'll look at the real cost of a no-show and tally it up for a realistic team.

Ready? Let's go:

The Cost

1. Setup Time

Setting up customer interviews takes time. For many teams, the incremental time to setup an individual call is non-trivial. Did it require several emails back and forth? Was a customer-facing team member like a CSM involved? Are you going to need to reach out to more customers if you have another no-show?

Let's be generous and say the incremental setup time took 5 minutes. But if we're being honest, it probably took much more.

2. Preparation Time

Preparing for an individual customer interview also takes time. This is separate from the fixed time it takes to frame and prepare a discovery.

Often, this prep time requires collecting context on the participant. It might requires looking at one or more of the following tools:

1. Support / Feedback Tickets
2. Product Analytics
3. Past Research / Notes
4. Past Emails
5. (B2B) CRM / Account information

Let's say the incremental setup time took 5 minutes. We've heard it take much more.

3. Buffer Time

Let's say you prepared for the call the day before, but it's now 30m before the interview and you're not sure whether you should pick up that next task, review your notes again, or make sure your interview setup is ready to go.

Let's say the buffer time cost is 10 minutes.

4. Waiting in The Call

After a few minutes you start suspecting this might be a no-show, but you wait until minute 5 to send a short reminder email. "Hey there, I'm in the meeting. I'll wait another few minutes."

Another few minutes pass and it's time to call it quits. Time to decide whether to let the participant reschedule (send another email), or cut your losses.

Total time? 10 minutes.

5. Context-Switching

While this is already a professional hazard for most product people, there's a real cost to context-switching. It’s not just about the interrupting the task you were doing, but it can impact downstream work in the rest of your day, especially if you have multiple calls scheduled.

Because this is hard to quantify, we'll leave it out of the tally below.

6. Cost x N

Were any of your teammates going to be on the call? Did you need an interpreter? Costs #3-5 apply to them, too.

7. Downstream Delays

Now that we've looked at the cost in terms of time, let's turn to the downstream implications.

We don't run customer interviews just for fun. We do it for fun and profit (ie. to build better products!)

Whether participants no-show or reschedule into the future, every day or week that goes by without the insights you need slows you down. And not just you, but your entire team and any downstream dependencies.

Examples of downstream impact:

• Do you need to reschedule the exec alignment call?
• Do you need to reschedule the kickoff meeting?
• Does your team wait? Do they move ahead with less confidence?

The Tally

Adding up just the quantifiable portion of costs – even conservatively – and we're at 30 minutes of time for the interviewer wasted per no-show. And that's ignoring the potential replacement cost of having to setup calls to compensate for the no-shows, the cost of context-switching, and the cost of downstream delays.

How much is your average product team member paid? How many no-shows do you have in a given month?

It's back-of-the-napkin math time!

(Conservative) Cost of no-shows = minutes wasted / 60 * hourly rate * # no shows per month

Let's look at a realistic example from a team I spoke to last week:

• Target: 8 interviews per month, per team
• Interview participants: interviewer + notetaker
• Teams: 4 teams
• No show rate: 25%
• Hourly rate: $100 (Conservatively)

No-shows per month: 8 * 0.25 * 4 = 8
Interviewer cost of no-shows: 30/60 * $100 * 8 = $400
Notetaker cost of no-shows: 15/60 * $100 * 8 = $200
Monthly cost to org: $600 * 4 teams = $2,400

Yep – that's $2,400 per month! 💰🔥

And that's a conservative view on just the quantifiable portion based on time. Running the numbers a bit less conservatively, that's $5,000-10,000 of productivity lost per month for the same team.

Is the cost to your team lower? Higher? Either way, I'd argue that it's a red herring, as the opportunity cost is often much higher due to the intangibles and downstream dependencies.

No-shows are not just frustrating. They're a real cost to your business. And while there's no silver bullet, there are plenty of tactics to reduce their frequency and cost, which we'll cover in an upcoming post.

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Thanks to Jessica Swanson and Amanda Wernicke for reviewing drafts of this post.