Newsletter Content: Visit A Customer

Signs Never Sleep is a blog that chronicles the life of a small sign company in small town New Hampshire. Recently a team of people from Gerber Scientific, a sign making equipment supplier, paid them a visit for some hands on experience in a customer's business. JD seemed to be pleased to welcome them and clearly put them right to work on real projects.

When was the last time your team visited customers and worked along side of them using your products? Do this a few times and you will definitely build your customer intuition.

Why do this:

Create Empathy with Customers - Visiting customers in their work environment helps create an understanding of the pressures people are under when using your products or services. Gain an understanding of what the dynamics of the industry are. Put human skin on the costs of your offerings.

Spot Valuable Hacks - Watching someone use your product or integrate your service into their business is a great opportunity to see unique and novel ways in which people use your products. Knowing why people do tasks in certain orders, what other products or tools are people using in combination with yours, discovering what your customers have tried and failed to do with your products and what wild things they have tried and been successful with are all valuable insights that can help you understand the future direction of product development.

Spot Opportunities - Talking with and observing customers during their normal work process can help you understand what challenges an opportunities they are facing and provide a wealth of ideas for new product development and innovation.

Building Relationships - A mutually beneficial customer visit helps to build a mutually beneficial relationship based on understanding and trust. Both businesses can use the event in their marketing communication. Both companies can look to each other for expertise. There may certainly be opportunities for marketing or product development partnerships going forward.

These of course are only some of the reasons for a working visit to customers. There are of course some additional benefits like team building and interpersonal relationship development among your own team members.

In any event now at the beginning of a new year is a great time to put some working customer visits on your calendar. Don't forget your camera to get those great pics for the email newsletter or company blog.