When times are good, communicating with customers is easy. Travel budgets are typically flush with cash, optimism abounds and your desire to discuss company direction is high. However, in difficult times one of the first things to drop off in many companies is customer interaction. Whether because of budget cuts or the more serious problem — loss of company confidence — communicating with customers seems to go by the wayside when times get tough.

Regardless of how well your company is doing, you need to communicate with customers. In a recent IBD article, Gloria Lau emphasized the importance of customer relationships:

Get out there and make sure clients know you’re there for them. A lot of suppliers are spending time internally focused, curtailing travel expenses. Instead, this is the time when you should spend more money with customers. You need to build those relationships to let clients know you’ll be there for them in the long term. Once you have a solid relationship with customers and you help them through a crisis, their memories can be pretty long.

In difficult economic times spending money to interact with customers is a sound investment. Spending time and money on potential customers is also relevant. Chances are your competitors are not making the same effort, so make the most of your opportunities.

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The Product Management Perspective: Much has been written about the importance of customer visits to the success of your products. As the product manager you have a tremendous opportunity to not only gain great insight for your products, but also to set the standard for your company with regard to communicating with your customers.

Boy have I been busy! My customer visits in the North East went swimmingly, but it was extremely hectic. I travelled to 4 states in 4 days and interviewed 6 customers. We started with Morgan Stanley, and then Bloomberg in New York. Then drove to New Jersey, and met with US News (Dow Jones) and Susquhanna Investment Group in PA. Then drove to Jersey City for Lord Abbott and up to Purdue Pharma in Connecticut.

My tools for the interview was a Sansa recorder, a notepad and pen. Our clients all had different work styles, environments and processes. There was one thing I was very happy about, and that was how nice and patient everyone was during the interview process. Everyone was more than amicable to take the time to answer our questions, it was almost like we were providing them with psychiatric treatment where they could unleash all of their IT problems.

I’m glad that I got the experience of going to customer interviews on this trip, I learned so much about our products, how they are being used, and about our customers. I took the customer data that I collected and assembled it into a call report. I also think that my relationship with product development has grown from this experience.

Now that I have collected user data first-hand. I am interested in viewing some of the previously collected user data and generating a mental model of this material. Unfortunately I don’t know if I will have the time to work on it.

Also, tonight, I will be giving a speech at RefreshMiami on Human Factors. This is at Yahoo Latin America in Coral Gables. It will just be a 10-15 minute speech on what a Human Factors Engineer does.

This morning I read an article in Billing & OSS World Magazine about User Experience. The title of the article was Copping the ‘Customer Experience’ Buzzword and this is how the article began…

“I hate when I succumb to the use of buzzwords. So I came reluctantly to the term “customer experience.” It always struck me as psycho-babble B.S. — and I don’t mean Bachelor of Science — that some precocious second-year grad from the Acme School of Business Management came up with to get a bunch of old techheads to stop thinking about their icky old networks. And thinking it impossible to ever accurately measure the quality of individual or collective experiences, I cringed every time I let the phrase slip into an article, thinking myself a shill for whichever nameless marketeer had coined it.”

So my question is what has happened to this individual and to usability that would create this type of impression to anyone. One of my goals as a UX Evangelist has been to take the mystery out of usability and to make it understandable and digestible by everyone. I mean usability affects every aspect of our life, why would it be so intimidating, or what would have caused it to lose credibility, and be described as a buzz-word of all things?! Is it because good usability makes things so seamless to use that people don’t even notice it?

By the end of the article the author acknowledges that usability is becoming more credible and that more companies are investing in it. But it still seems like this is an area that remains mysterious to many of whom do not understand it. People seem to understand the concept of convenience, why do they not understand ease of use?

As this blog grows, I hope to take away some of the mystery of usability. I know I haven’t gotten into it very deep so far, and most of my messages have discussed methodologies, and the whatnot without getting very detailed, but this is because I’ve been waiting to practice some of the processes, and provide some real feedback about my experiences and have some real content to discuss. Hopefully this will all come to fruition next week as I will be in NYC on customer visits.

As I already alluded to my internship at Lenzing Fibers Shanghai in recent posts I would like to go into further detail concerning job-related tasks by this post.

My presentation in .pdf f.y.r.: michael-eichinger-in-shanghai

After I gave the staff at LFS a short ppt presentation about myself, family, friends, hobbies, Austria and its geographical core position in Europe (respectively to emerging markets in CEE), my studies and the little trading company (ODEM | www.odem.eu) my mother set up in Austria, I immediately received my Chinese nickname 小麦 (xiaomai: little Mike). That’s tradition in China to address the daughter or son with the prefix 小 (xiao: little). Similarly the parent generation receives the prefix 老 (lao: old (respectfully speaking)). To give an example my father would be called “laodi” (Dieter Eichinger).
The nickname mainly originated from Peter Gao who is responsible for the Sales at LFS.

He introduced me to the Business Plan and vision of the office and we also discussed differences between the ways of doing business in China and Europe. As it is a short time for me joining LFS he integrated me into an existing project which is all about customer acquisition to be precise developer acquisition. So my tasks will consist of supporting Aurora (responsible for Marketing) in customer visits and the following reporting. This is quite interesting especially for me as it enables the opportunity of seeing different places even outside of Shanghai and getting a glimpse of doing business in China.
This topic, precisely the comparison of the two different management styles of course needs deeper research and further elaboration. If workload allows it I will manifest my observations and go into more detail.

View from the office building (23rd floor) not far away from the People’s Square.

Doing a quick search on the Internet for blogs regarding customer references, I noticed that a majority of them ask how to find a reference for a particular software application or some other product. Most of these are from the perspective of the person (generally sales or a consultant) looking for answers for their customer/prospect. Very few of the blogs talk about how to run a Customer Reference Program and how to pull one together from scratch. I’m hoping to help answer some of these issues with this blog.

Types of customer references
When starting your reference program it’s important to realize the many different types of references. Start with basic 101…is this is sales or marketing reference? Although they might seem like they are the same and ultimately will affect one another, they are generally two very different types.

Sales references include:
Customer speaking with a prospect over the phone/email
Prospect wanting to visit a customer to see how the product works
Name dropping in a prospect call/meeting

Marketing references include:
Press release
Case study
Speaking with analysts
Speaking with the media
Website listing
Use of name and/or logo in Marketing material

In general, it’s usually easier to find a Sales reference than a Marketing reference for one basic reason…Sales references are generally not going to be made public. It’s that simple. Marketing references are used for..well, marketing reasons which means letting pretty much the world know that customer XYZ is a customer of vendor XYZ.

Because it’s a public reference, most customers will have to get approval by their Legal and/or Public Relations team if not more people. This extends the approval process and scares some people away as more time and effort is needed.

Rule #1: When using a customer for a public reference such as logo use on a Website or in a press release always get the customers approval at least once before doing so. If a customer has approved a quote and you want to re-use it, that’s generally okay. But for the first time usage, make sure to get approval!