god bless the customer
I’ve just come up for air after an intensive 2-day summit with a customer. It’s really been an amazing experience and I’m looking forward to more of the same.
For two days, I left behind the day-to-day of the day job – personnel, projects, deadlines and milestones – and became immersed in the life of one of our customers. They came to visit, and I was there to ensure that the right people learned/understood their business realities, their environments, their deliverables, their success and their issues. I was there to be their advocate.
I only wish that every developer, every quality engineer, every manager, could have the same experience.
Spend two days with your customer. Get to know them. Talk to them face-to-face. Find out how they are using your product and the issues they are experiencing. Learn how they are using your product, because dollars to donuts, it’s going to be in some unique way you never visualized. Share their success stories, and feel pride in their deployment of your tools. Feel their pain as they detail lost revenue, or tales of their unhappy customers due to problems with your tools. Go out to dinner with them. Get to know them. As people, as well as customers.
I guarantee those impersonal escalation reports with your customer’s name beside it will never look the same.
And these particular customers got a special bonus: how many customers can boast of business meetings with a medieval princess?
