Sitting Ducks (in a customer’s boardroom)
We had poor quality performance with a major customer. We were faced with several failed units from the most important product line at the customer. Instead of holding a conference call to review the quality issue and our actions, the customer management invited us to visit them in person. Our preparation was limited, as we expected to have a brief conversation to share planned recovery actions. We ended up in an intimidating, massive board room with the largest table you can imagine. Two of us sat there at one end of the table with about 18 customer executives around the table asking for pin-pointed updates.
When we were unable to provide on-th e-spot answers, they literally locked us into an office to make the phone calls necessary to get the required information. Behind that locked door, we hurriedly called our colleagues in production and engineering to get answers to their questions. Once we had some information, the customer let us out to review it. We were able to better communicate our plans and get out of there alive!
The key in an urgent situation is to prepare thoroughly, anticipate the customer’s needs and concerns (both real and perceived), collect all of the needed information beforehand, and be ready to share a well-thought-out plan with people who might be quite emotional. You can learn the customer communication skills to calm a customer, show you are in control, and turn around problems toward a successful recovery. Don’t become a sitting duck!
Want to restore or maintain customer confidence even in the most challenging situations? CAEDENCE’s novel, realistic role-play based workshop “Keys to Effective Customer Influencing” (including companion book) is one of our most-requested offerings because it is so memorable and effective. Here’s what one engineering director had to say, "CAEDENCE Consulting brings a new perspective to training, leveraging years of experience into a relevant exercise combining technical and soft skills into a comprehensive package for a cross-functional engineering team. The impact is clear: my team is already much more effectively managing customers in a variety of challenging situations.“
Preparing for a presentation is vital in enabling team members to convey critical points, and influence outcomes with customers. Here are the steps involved.
When customer tensions rise, the right approach can turn friction into collaboration. At CAEDENCE, we call it the 3C’s: Calm, Clarify, Control. Here's more detail.
Will AI Replace Direct Customer Communication? Absolutely Not! In an age of chatbots and algorithms, the highest-impact discussions still happen person-to-person.
B2B customer relationships are not a breeze. We’ve navigated hundreds of challenging accounts and distilled five secrets that consistently turn friction into forward progress.
Ever notice how a quick fix from the top can feel like a shortcut, but it ends up stunting your team’s growth? When managers rush to answers, they inadvertently affect team development.
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
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
Does your team struggle to deliver the kind of rapid and effective problem-solving your business requires? Can you really afford the unhappy customers, wasted engineering hours, cost of poor quality, and lost opportunities? Use the Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ approach by CAEDENCE.
Negative customer experiences can destroy your business! Have you been faced with any angry customers this year? CAEDENCE's Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ enhanced problem-solving toolkit was the answer. It integrates seamlessly with your existing problem-solving approach and systems.
Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.
