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Team Building Articles Team Management Involving The Customer -- Why Bother? 
| Involving The Customer -- Why Bother? |
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Imagine for a moment that you are the owner of a card shop. You've been struggling to stay open and keep the cash flow stable. All of a sudden, you get a phone call from the XYZ company.
They want you to make 10,000 specialty cards for them. They tell you that all of the requirements for the cards are documented. All you have to do is follow the requirements, create the cards and get them out in two weeks. "No problem," you say. "Send the information over and we'll get started on them right away." Two hours later, you have the requirements in your hand. They look like this: Create three unique cards. One with a star, a line, a box, and blue on it. One with three circles, red and three lines on it. One with a box, a question mark and yellow on it. These need to be folded in half twice to fit our specialty envelopes. You know this is a really BIG customer. If you fill the order properly, this could mean long term business. Ahh, no more cash flow worries. But, what if you do it wrong? There's a lot left to interpretation in those requirements. And what about that time line? How many of each card type do they want? Will they think you were the wrong choice for a vendor if you call for clarification? Will they pull the contract? What do you do? Whether you're a business owner, a manager, or a member of a work team, some type of input comes from someone which requires you to do work and produce some output. Working in a vacuum with hand-offs from someone else can be a prescription for error or even worse, a prescription for failure. Success is as easy as involving your stakeholders or customers in the work process. This can be as simple as a phone call or as complex as a series of meetings. Whatever it takes, do it! You might be asking, "What's the value of wasting all that precious time to meet with someone when we could be doing the work?" Clarifying customer requirements, identifying roles, scope and boundaries of your work up front in the process allows you to be more successful. In the long run, you could end up with:
What's wrong with that? Make that phone call. Denise O'Berry helps businesses improve. Visit www.deniseoberry.com for more info. |
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