What are the best ways to conduct customer interviews?

We have only done this once, with the help of a company, but we offered a visa gift card. They had them fill out a generic survey that got our ideal customers (you cannot make it too obvious who you are targeting or they will pretend). The actual questions coincided with a few personas we came up with ahead of time. For a design feedback approach the https://www.thesprintbook.com/th... is the gold standard.

Recently I was reading an article about how you can interact and improve this interaction with customers and came across an article on Customer Relationships which presented various tips and tricks on how and where to collect customer feedback. Quite often, companies neglect quite simple things and lose their credibility because of this.