How do I effectively respond to a customer request?
Preparing for a presentation is vital in enabling team members to convey critical points, and influence outcomes with customers and management. Struggling teams have disorganized information, lists of actions without clear purpose, and lack a cohesive narrative.
When the storyline is unclear or missing, time is wasted responding to questions as the audience desperately tries to figure out the meaning of what is being said (distracting from meaningful discussion).
How good are you at conveying a coherent narrative? Probably not as good as you think!
Here are the steps involved in preparing to tell a clear story::
- Define “Why is the question being asked?” The customer asked a question motivating your update. If you don't understand why they asked, you won't be able to give them what they need in a form they'll understand.
- Outline “What is needed to answer it?”. Do you need data? Do you need to speak to colleagues to gather opinions? How can you put yourself in a position to answer the question fully?
- Collect relevant information. Compile test results, data, expert inputs, statistical analyses, etc.. Make sure your info is relevant to the question at hand.
- Analyze. "Conclusions" are different from "results". Results simply report what happened (e.g., group A performed 10% better in strength testing than group B). Conclusions convey the meaning of the results (e.g., on the basis of the strength testing, we recommend using the group A material for improved safety margin, even though it will increase unit cost by 5%).
- Organize Your Narrative. The info must be sequenced to bring the audience through the details without getting lost. Organize the information into a distinct path starting with context, and conclusions, then filling in the results supporting the conclusions.
- Create Slides or Reports. Use the conclusion as your title; don’t make the listener wait and wonder. Include annotated graphs & charts to clarify. Know that your slides, reports, and emails will be forwarded to people beyond the working project team. If your work can't be understood by reading (without you there to explain it), then it's not clear enough.
- Use templates. A template can align the audience to a consistent flow of info and help clarify. This helps the customer or management understand more quickly and reduces time spent figuring things out.
- Practice. Take time to practice your presentation, review content with team members beforehand, and refine your message. Practice may not make perfect, but it sure can help.
Following these steps will dramatically improve your ability to communicate effectively with customers and management. Influential communication is a career enhancer, and it's one of the areas we're most frequently asked to coach.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
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I was struggling to get updates from my regional project management directors. Sensing my frustration at having to constantly repeat my (apparently futile) requests to the team to provide their updates consistently, my boss suggested, “If you want something done, schedule it.” He meant that if updates are needed at a specific time, actually schedule them directly on people's calendars, making the expectation and reminder "automatic" each month, and emphasizing the importance of the updates by turning them into meetings – people tend not to show up empty handed to meetings where they're expected to present. Scheduling removed a bit of "friction" and created a sense of urgency that resulted in real progress. Amazingly, they didn’t miss any updates after that point!
