Get to Know
Your Customers...Really!

Home | Services | Workshops | Programs | Recession Strategies | Core Beliefs | About DeltaNet | Contact Us

But This Most Fundamental Level of Competition is Too Often Ignored

In our experience, too many business managers and executives do not take full advantage of the latent power of their customer relationships:

• They put too much emphasis on things like gathering "customer data", running statistical analyses, reading market research reports, and studying the competitors products.
• They put too little emphasis on learning about their customers as people.
• They obsessively study issues within their businesses and routinely ignore important issues in the systems their businesses serve—like their customer networks.

Learn, Unite, Win

Our Customer Integration Program unites a small number of people with diverse education, experience, and temperaments into empowered cross-functional teams. We typically begin by helping managers select team members who represent a broad cross-section of internal groups with the biggest stakes in the potential outcomes of the program.

During a typical Customer Integrations Program, we train and coach those teams of people though a logical sequence of program stages to:

• Develop the knowledge, skills and processes they will need to form a real cross-functional team
• Build more, stronger human network links with their customers than their best competitors do.
• Skillfully use rational team processes to create new products the customers will want, new customers for the products you have, and completely new businesses with new products AND new customers

We help people get out of their endless string of internal meetings and get into in their customers' ecosystems. That's where team members learn about the customers and about each other in ways that will lead to:

• Retain more of their current customers
• Win more new customers
• Collaborate with their customers to co-create value
• Help their customers to define their businesses

Our Customer Relationship Development Program in a Nutshell

Program Planning

We deliver consulting and coaching services to managers responsible for the program to help them define its scope and objectives:

• Set challenging but achievable expectations.
• Define costraints, e.g. budget and time line.
• Select team members for behavioral style and stakeholder representation.

Effective Customer Interviews Workshop

Our Customer Interviews Workshop presents the skills and processes that we have developed over the past 15 years in a concise 1-day interactive workshop.

Coaching Customer Relationship Development Teams

Interview teams learn a lot in our Customer Interview Workshop, but the development of the skills and the effective use of the processes needed to become a proficient interview team takes practice and a process of continual improvement.

That process of continual improvement proceeds much faster and reaches higher levels of proficiency if the interview teams have a coach, particularly during the first 10 or 20 interviews, where both good and bad habits are most like to become well established.

We deploy a coach to travel with the teams. The coach facilitates the briefings and debriefings, applies just-in-time training between interviews, and helps the team members to overcome the inevitable disappointments that come with learning a new skill or adopting a new process.

Our coach participates as an observer during the interviews, much like a sports coach would do. We only rarely engage in the interview process, e.g. to help an interviewer in a particularly difficult situation.

Understanding the Results of the Customer Interviews

The process described so far is very similar to the first phases of the Quality Function Deployment Process, as it was defined and adopted in Japan beginning in the 1950s. Adoption of QFD by the western cultures too often diminished the importance of the human relationships between the people in the business and its customers. In the Japanese culture, that was taken more or less for granted. In the western cultures, it was converted to a more structured, more data driven process.

The process we use in our Customer Relationship Development Programs is strongly relationship-based, rather than data-based. Therefore the outcome is relatively unstructured, like a conversation among friends.

Statistical data reduction process are not applicable.We offer coaching and training to help the interview teams create winning solutions using a rational process similar to the Japanese version of QFD:

• Convert the unstructured Voice of the Customer into more structured Voice of the Developer
• Create a prioritized list of Real Wants and Needs from the Voice of the Developer
• Create a list of Solutions correlated with the Real Wants and Needs

Project Planning and Execution

Cross-functional Customer Interview Teams create excellent project plans based on their shared knowledge of their potential customers and their shared experiences in creating their own prioritized list of solutions together.

Even more important, teams members who have created their own plans together, based on the experiences they shared with their potential customers and the knowledge they acquired during those experiences, will move mountains to do what they have planned to do.

Cross-functional teams of people who skillfully use our Customer Interview Processes will win customers from competitors who define their businesses, their products, and their customers using more conventional methods within conventional hierarchical organizations.

Home | Services | Workshops | Programs | Recession Strategies | Core Beliefs | About DeltaNet | Contact Us