The Uniquely Human Power of Following the Thread in an Insight Interview - by Chenai Gondo

Recently, I’ve been retraining myself.

Not as a strategist. Not as a CEO. But as an interviewer.

I’ve been shadowing our team at RealService - watching how they speak to the people who actually use buildings: the occupiers, the employees, the people shaping places through their daily routines.

It’s been humbling, because these interviews are nothing like the ones I used to do at McKinsey & Company. Back then, I spoke to paid experts - people being paid £1,000 for their time and whose entire incentive was to give you exactly what you needed to know. Those conversations were efficient, clinical, and deeply transactional. You asked. They answered. Job done.

Customer insight interviews are the opposite because nobody’s being paid to participate. They don’t owe you an answer. You have to earn it. You have to build trust, read cues, and sense when to dig deeper and to understand not just what someone does, but why.

A basic web survey or a bot could never do this work. Not in a million years.

1. Insight isn’t handed to you. You have to coax it out.

When you’re trying to understand how people actually use a building, what matters isn’t just the question, but it’s the moment you sense there’s something underneath.

People rarely reveal the good stuff in their first answer. They do it when you push a little further:

“Why was that?” “What made you do that?” “Tell me more about that part.”

That instinct - to catch the hesitation, to follow the thread - is something deeply human. A web survey won’t hear the pause in someone’s voice when they talk about how they really use a space. A chatbot can’t pick up on subtle frustration, or delight, or delicate workarounds.

This is the craft of insight interviewing: not extracting answers, but uncovering meaning.

2. The real gold lies between the questions.

Every real estate project starts with a structured survey or interview guide. But the best insight work happens when you go off-script.

After a few conversations, patterns emerge you didn’t even know to look for. That’s when good interviewers adjust, go deeper, and unlock what standard surveys miss.

A bot will just keep asking the same thing. A web form can’t pivot. A human can.

That’s why we often revisit our question set mid-project. Because genuine understanding doesn’t come from ticking boxes but from curiosity.

3. A story: the hidden transport insight.

On one recent project, we were helping a client understand how occupiers travelled to and around a large business park.

The brief seemed simple:

“Ask people who commute by bus.”

Then, during one conversation, someone casually said:

“I actually drive to work. But I take the bus at lunchtime.”

That one line completely changed the picture.

It revealed that the bus wasn’t just a commuting mode — it was part of how people navigate the site during the day.

From that moment, we started asking everyone about lunchtime bus use. And what emerged was a richer, more accurate understanding of how people really move around.

That’s the kind of subtle, practical insight a web survey would never surface. Only a human interviewer - tuned in and curious - could find it.

4. Scripts don’t unlock insight. People do.

A chatbot can ask decent questions. A web form can give you neat pie charts. But they can’t feel the moment when an occupier says something that quietly rewrites your understanding of how a building actually works.

Great insight work in real estate isn’t about data collection. It’s about revealing the lived experience of places. And that requires a human.

🪡 Follow the thread. Don’t miss the story.

If your customer insight strategy begins and ends with a bot or basic web survey, you’re getting data — but not truth.

At RealService, we specialise in human-led customer insight for the real estate industry.

We speak directly to the people who occupy, manage, and experience buildings every day. We uncover the patterns hidden between the questions, the kind that shape strategy, investment, design, and operations.

👉 If you’re a landlord, developer, investor or operator planning your next survey, start it with us. Let’s make sure you hear the real story of how your spaces are used.

📩 DM me - and for more insights like this follow me Chenai Gondo, PhD