Bill Gaw's Triple-Step, World Class, Lean Manufacturing Training Program
World Class Manufacturing

Increase the effectiveness of your
Lean Manufacturing Training Program
Lean Manufacturing Simulation Game 

Introduction

• More and more companies are using customer visits and in-depth customer interviews to get a first hand feel for markets, customer satisfaction, and sources of new opportunities.
• The challenge is how to get the most value out of these activities—and not come back with a partial or mud­died picture.
• This workshop will deal with issues in planning cus­tomer visits and tools to improve your ability to gain the most insights from customer interactions.

Reduce Misunderstanding Through Better Planning

There is no substitute for up-front planning. In fact, E. Edward Russo and Paul Schoemaker, in Decision Traps, have stated the number one source for bad decisions is gathering information and reaching conclusions without first taking a few minutes to think about the crux of the issue. This means taking time to consider what decisions will be affected by the customer visits or interviews, what information will make a difference in those decisions, and which customers (or people within a customer company) have that information.

The most common problems encountered in customer visits include insufficient understanding of what your internal "client" needs, improper selection of whom to interview, inaccurate "framing" of the assignment, and ineffective interviewing skills.

Understanding the Needs of Your internal "Clients"

The best way to ensure that you understand the purpose of the visits is to interview your internal clients—about their reasons for the visits, what they expect to find, and where these expectations came from (e.g., past experience, analo­gies, something they read). If findings prove to be different, what value or concern would that be? What actions would they change?

Make a special effort to find people within your company who have different or dissenting points of view. Interview them to understand their thinking. Ask what concerns they have about potential bias or errors in the visits and what steps would ease those concerns.

Make sure everyone involved understands the reasoning behind your proposed approach. Neglecting this step is the single most common reason for difficulties in acceptance of your results by the rest of the organization.
Frequently, when discussing the focus of the visits with clients, you will discover great confusion about the scope

and intent of the project. Some internal clients want to collect "facts and figures" to plan product enhancements and refinements. Others think of the visits as a way to develop product "specifications." In both cases, customer visits are probably not the appropriate vehicle for informa­tion. Customer visits are better suited for those who want to understand the fundamental drivers of the customer's business and look for opportunities for truly new products or services.

The more your mission is to learn about the basic drivers of customer businesses and their future trends, the more the discussions should probe the customer's reasoning for the trends and strategies. If your mission is to refine existing services or designs, a more structured approach is probably appropriate.
Selecting Whom to Interview

Sometimes, choosing whom to speak with is not an obvious choice. Your challenge is finding the people who have the knowledge you need and it may take several advance phone calls to find out who this is.

An added complication is the question of different frames— yours and that of the person you interview. You may be thinking of "logistics" while the customer is thinking of "mail room."

During the workshop we will discuss a model for safely negotiating your way through these pitfalls, to get quality interviews.

To be Continued