Create an outlet for input. On every screen in our [software] system, there’s a button [customers] can click on and then fill out a user support request. They can direct it to anyone in the company or just into the general pool where it gets evaluated and triaged and scheduled. They can make it a critical/urgent, in which case it goes to everybody in the company. If the main people working on their account are on vacation, then somebody will jump on it because it goes to everybody in the organization.
It goes into a database with a priority — critical, nice to have, that kind of thing. Our team leaders get notified the instant those go in the database so they can continually look at the number of requests in a given area and start to draw conclusions about, ‘Boy, this topic is very popular and important to a number of customers. Let’s focus on that.’
Likewise, the sales team uses the same system to put in requests for changes to the product to support things they’ve learned about in the sales process. So we capture all those requests in a database and then our team leaders review those requests, determine which ones are most pressing and most valuable to our customers and then pursue those.
If a customer is willing to pay for an enhancement, that’s a good signal that it’s important to them. So that’s one measure. Then the sheer frequency and the priority of the requests from the customers are the next indicator. If 10 customers are saying, ‘It’s absolutely critical to my business,’ that’s a higher priority than two customers saying, ‘It’d be nice to have.’
Keep customer requests in perspective. The biggest reason for failure is a failure to manage the scope, meaning once people are into it, they say, ‘Oh, it would be a great idea to do this, this, this and this.’ If they pursue all of those ideas, they’ll never get done. That’s the most common failure. Our team is really focused on what are the business objectives and let’s stay focused on that. Get that achieved, then we’ll look at other opportunities for improvement.
Identify critical success factors at the start of a project. We try to manage expectations on how the project will go and what kind of pitfalls can come about. So addressing that upfront really helps down the road.
When you’re in the heat of battle, you’re midway through the project, you can fall back on those agreements and those guidelines that you laid out upfront. [It’s a] reminder as to what the implications are of not watching the scope, not managing the project carefully.
How to reach: Plex Systems Inc., (248) 391-8001 or www.plex.com