How to Connect with Customers as People

This 1-day interactive workshop introduces skills and processes that enable people in your business to relate with people in your customers' businesses to co-create value.

Understand the feelings and beliefs that determine the behavior of your customers.
Understand the customers' work, culture and priority systems.
Conduct interviews in small teams to add perspective and to disperse more of the new learnings throughout your business organization.
Adopt three different roles for interview team members to maximize communication and make the customers want more.

The purpose of This Workshop

Expect to understand:

Develop Your Skills Through Coaching and Practice

Developing your interview skills requires practice and coaching in real interviews. Think of it this way. You could learn a lot about flying an airplane in a 1-day workshop, but that would not be sufficient to make you a skilled pilot.

Workshop Mission

Learn, Unite, Win

This workshop was developed by DeltaNet's founders as a component of DeltaNet's programs to help clients build winning businesses. The founders have combined their skills and experience in social psychology and business management with their decades-long cross-cultural life style to create DeltaNet's Programs and the features of this workshop. With practice and coaching, participants will help their businesses to remove many conventional barriers to winning in business by:

Most Conventional Methods Don't Work

Customers are Human Beings, Not Databases

The mission of most conventional customer research methods is to gather "customer data" and to reduce the data using repeatable statistical analyses. Customers are treated as databases. But customers are people, not databases. People have many, many reasons for answering your questions. Providing full and accurate responses is probably not at the top of their priority list.

Questionnaires Don't Work.

The developer of the questionnaire selects the topics and sets the importance scale to reflect the priorities of the business. It would only be an accident if the topics or their scale of importance even remotely resembled the customers' views.

Direct Questions Don't Work

Most customers will answer direct questions, whether they actually know the answer or not. If they have had a bad experience with your company or its products, or if they simply woke up in a bad mood, they may even try to be deceptive. It's not easy to detect factors like that, especially if you like the answers.

Focus Groups Don't Work

Focus groups put people who most likely will never interact with each other again into a setting in which they play off of each others' ideas. There is no useful, established connection between their opinions and behaviors in the focus group and their opinions and behaviors when they see your future products.

This Method Does Work

This workshop introduces a method designed to take advantage of the well-researched motivators of human behavior, rather than trying to screen them out. It is based on face-to-face, interactive meetings in the customers' facility, using small cross-functional interview teams.

Selecting Interview Subjects

Representing Your Target Markets

This may seem obvious, but we see this decision far to often treated far too lightly, ignored altogether, or decided using unchallenged assumptions.

Appropriate to Your Mission

If your mission is to find new customers for current products, to create new products or new businesses, interviewing current customers and prospects may not be appropriate.

Appropriate to the Current Stage of Your Project

The people you would choose for customer interviews could or should be different for each stage of your project. Here are some simple examples, based on typical concurrent engineering stages:

Interviewing in Teams

Learn to conduct interviews in cross-functional teams of three. The diversity of perspectives provides far more learning during this very short window of time in the working life of the customers, and the learnings are more likely to be dispersed into the different stakeholder groups represented by the three cross-functional team members.

To guard against confusing the customers with a three person interview team, each member assumes a different specific primary role:

Understand the Customers' Feelings, Actions, and Beliefs

Learn and practice techniques to understand the customers' beliefs. Develop an awareness of how those beliefs are likely to affect the customers' future behaviors, e.g when your new products are launched.

Put Ingroup/Outgroup Bias to Work for You

Don't try to screen this out. Put this powerful motivator to work for you. It will ensure the quality and fullness of the information you collect, and it will erect a barrier between this customer and your competitors.

The Five Stages of Effective Customer Visits

Learn to use these five stages of an effective customer interview. Like the military process; ready, aim, fire, every step must be completed proficiently and in the right order for a successful outcome.