Customer Visits

Today more and more businesses seek to get closer to their customers. While many books urge a customer focus, few offer much in the way of specific advice. This book emphasizes the importance of sending cross-functional teams to visit customers at their workplace and explains how this approach can assist new product development and the improvement of customer satisfaction. Drawing on best practices found at leading technology firms, Customer Visits, Second Edition offers a complete guide to all aspects of planning and executing a program of customer visits. A wealth of specific advice is offered on topics such as the right and wrong kinds of objective, how many customers to visit, how to prepare a discussion guide, how to coordinate visits with the sales force, how to build rapport, effective and ineffective questions to ask customers, and traps and pitfalls in the analysis of data from visit programs. The author?'s years of experience teaching seminars for leading firms insure that the advice offered in this book is practical and actionable. Managers and engineers engaged in new product development will discover a wealth of suggestions for finding out what customers really want. Executives will discover a practical and cost-effective approach to motivating employees to focus on customer satisfaction. New in the second edition: + Expanded coverage of ad hoc visits + More examples of good and bad procedures + Expanded section on how to analyze visit data + Expanded coverage of questions to ask customers + Better integration with other market research tools