The Productologist

Today, my own advice worked…for me. I went to visit a customer with some other team members to hear feedback from the customer about their experience with my product and hear some of their enhancement requests. I tend to over-prepare for these types of visits where I end up bringing a lot more than I need (everyone else on my team just brought a notebook and pen), but today it turned out that my over-preparedness paid off.

I wrote earlier that it’s a good idea to bring along a thumb drive in case you need to transfer files. I also carry around an extra (my company gives them as tchochkies) that I can give out if needed.

On the customer visit, it turned out that they were not running the latest version of the product. I discussed improvements in the latest release that would address some of their issues and concerns with the version that they were currently running. I was able to give them copies of the release notes for the latest release, which highlighted the new features and lists the bugs fixed since the last release.

I just pulled out my spare thumb drive, copied the files from my laptop and handed it over to them. Now, the customer not only has a good feeling about our ability to quickly respond, they have a physical reminder of the experience.

Later on in the meeting, we discovered that the customer was a bit overwhelmed by all of the features (I haven’t heard that complaint for this product before). I captured the enhancement request to have a quick-and-dirty way to move through the workflow if the user only wanted to use the minimal requirements, but we also learned that the customer was not very familiar with the product documentation.

I asked for the thumb drive back and had one of my co-workers copy a MS Word version of our quick-start guide on to it so that the customer could review it and also use it to create a pared down version to suit their process. Two issues resolved while on-site with the customer!

Now, granted, I could have done the same thing by emailing them the files when I got back to the office, but would that have had the same impact?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 at 8:58 am PT and is filed under Best Practices, Customers.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.