Customer Focus in Turbulent Times

The worksheet

If you follow the four rules, you will be ready when your company experiences a business-shifting event. By knowing your business, you will be able to see the crisis coming. By knowing your culture, you will know how to propose your solutions in a way that will put your team in the best possible position. If you are able to forget history, you will be ready to look outside your normal solution set for a problem that is outside the norm for your organization. If you are considered but quick, you will able to position your team as an organizational leader. So now, how are you going to figure out your response?

In this section you’ll find a worksheet that I use as a framework for defining new or changed customer needs, and for help with analyzing possible reactions. It is slightly different for current and new customers. This worksheet consists of two almost-identical tables. One table (see Table 1) is for major shifts that a current customer is experiencing. The second table (see Table 2) is for a new customer. You can use the appropriate worksheet on your own, with your team management, or with your entire team.

Analysis of the situation

As you can see, the worksheet starts with the Customer and the Effects that the situation has on the customer. I recommend that you use a separate worksheet for each customer and effect. Also, remember that the customer that you are considering is your company’s customer, not your e-Learning team’s customer. Of course, you’ll have to deal with changing requirements of your team’s customers as well, but that’s not the focus at the moment.

For example, if you create e-Learning for a toy company, and your doll designs from the early 20^th century were featured in an exhibit on images of different races in the United States, you may find that ethnographers are a new company customer group. That might not seem to affect your team at all, but you would still want to do an analysis to make sure you don’t need to update your training to include how cultural imagery in the toys has evolved over time.

On the New Customer worksheet (Table 2), there is a line for a Quick Analysis of what the new customer will want from your company in the current situation.

The next line (for current and new customers alike) is for defining New Goals. You’ll notice that the worksheet has space for only three. Since you’re working on quick response planning, you don’t want to have too many goals fragmenting your efforts.

My suggestion for using the worksheet is to fill out these fields (Customer, Effects, New Goals) first, on your own. Then, prioritize the worksheets by stacking the most important on top. Once you have the three that are the most important, put the others away in a folder for later. If you are able to successfully address the top case (Customer/Effect and the associated goals), you can go back to the other sheets and see if they are still applicable, or if the situation has evolved further.

Next, I’d suggest asking team members to review the results of your analysis and prioritization – either just management or the entire group, depending on what’s most comfortable for you. Get their reactions to check your analysis of the customer, effect and goals, then continue filling out your three chosen worksheets.

Responding to the situation

The next two lines are where you put possible responses to the changing customer relationship. I have broken them down into Team Changes and Product Changes. 

Team changes

Team changes are structural in nature. They are the things you do to make sure you are ready to provide the solutions that you are proposing. I have not included big changes such as adding staff, bringing in people with different skill sets, or purchasing a new Content Management System. The interventions proposed at this stage of the game should be fast and cost-effective. If they are very successful, you may have set the stage to propose more costly and far-ranging solutions. Team changes that I have found to be effective are:

• Partnering: A cross-functional team or a task force might be the best way to develop an appropriate solution to a new customer need. Let’s say that your business is now subject to new regulation. A task force from IT, Legal, and e-Learning might be needed to bring about a training solution that will show that your company is meeting new training requirements. If your team and another have skills and resources that both need, you might even want to consider a merger.  
• Focusing: In a stressful business climate, you may have to focus most of your efforts on solutions to the crisis. Cut other tasks that cannot be abandoned for a while to the bone, and gradually pick them up as your customer relationship solutions are implemented. 
• Renaming: Are you certain that leadership understands your contribution to the company? Does your team name clearly indicate (to people without Instructional Design degrees) what you do? Do your product names align with business terminology? When the business climate is shifting, it’s more important to have your function explained with a glance at the organization chart than to have a name that is prestigious-sounding but vague, or that spells a clever acronym. Another reason to rename your team might be to show capabilities that you would like to exercise. For example, you might change your team name from “E-Learning Development” to “E-Learning and Web 2.0 Solutions.”
• Restructuring: If your team structure is not efficient, change it. Points of contact should be clear to the rest of your company, and the skills of your team members should be fully used – titles or reporting arrangements should not keep you from taking advantage of the expertise of each person.

Product changes

Product changes are ways in which your e-Learning itself might evolve. They include:

• Repurposing: You may already have e-Learning that could meet the new customer needs with a little tweaking, which could consist of making it available on a different Web page or making minor content or interface adjustments.
• Changing content: The situation will most likely call for you to update content in existing training, or add new courses, etc. If content is changing rapidly, you may need to come up with ways to streamline input, production, and approvals.
• Providing new tools: If your help desk is now responding to a new set of user troubles, you may want to provide some decision support tools. If you have new compliance requirements, you may need to add scored tests and a way to report the data. In this case, rather than telling your senior leadership that you need a LMS that costs many thousands of dollars and takes six months to configure, you should propose an interim solution to get your company through the short term.
• Delivering with new vehicles: New customers or new needs of existing customers may require new delivery vehicles. For example, if security becomes an issue, you may need to move training behind a firewall or add password requirements for access. If geographically diverse customers need quickly updated information, you may want to use blogs, Webinars, Twitter, or text messaging. 

You’ll notice that I’ve put these tactics along the bottom of the worksheet, because I want to remind myself to consider them. I’m sure there are others that could also be added; these are just my favorites.

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