My last post addressed the reengineering of the first of three key customer related processes as part of making the transition to a customer intimate company. The three processes are product management, results management and customer relationship management. In this post, I’ll give my views on how a customer intimate company proactively manages the results that their customers achieve with their solutions.

In the software industry, reengineering the processes associated with actively managing customer results involves product quality, professional services and customer support. I applaud the industries in which product quality is generally high and customers are overall satisfied with the quality level of the products they are using. Product quality is generally poor in the software industry. Of the eleven products that we’ve acquired at Consona, only one met our quality standards at the time of acquisition. We have found the main cause for product quality issues at most of the companies that we’ve acquired to be rushing a new product version out to the market in order to attract new customers at the expense of thorough product testing and, thus, existing customers. Our approach is to work on a new product version until it meets quality standards, even if it means delaying a release past its announced release date. Whatever industry you’re in, a transition to a customer intimacy strategy is likely to require the reengineering of product development processes. If you’re in manufacturing, it could be the implementation of a Six Sigma program. If you’re in software, it could be the implementation of a Capability Maturity Model program.

At the first user conference that I attended as part of Consona, which was for the first company acquired by Consona, I had two customers independently tell me that their company had been a customer of ours for a long time, that they were relatively new with their company, that their company had not seen anyone from Consona in years, and ask me if we could have someone visit them to check on how they were using our system. We not only provided the “Check-up” service to those two customers, we also turned the concept into a program. Prior to acquisition, the attitude regarding providing professional services to the customer base was to work on it whenever consultants were available due to the new customer sales rate being below expectations. Implementing the “Check-up” service and being much more proactive about working with customers to understand their ongoing needs were a couple of the first actions that we took to transition to a customer intimate strategy. The most important item that we worked on was instilling in our company an attitude that we share responsibility with our customers for the results that they achieve with our solutions for the initial implementation and on an ongoing basis. Once the attitude change took hold, we quickly accomplished the reengineering of services methodologies, practices and processes and the development of a complete line of services designed to help our customers accomplish all of their objectives for using our product in line with Geoffrey Moore’s Whole Product concept.

In the area of customer support, we did not have as much reengineering to do on the first Consona acquisition, as that company already had an award-winning support organization. And, by now, you’ve gotten the picture. We worked with an already very good support team on values, culture and slight process changes and ended up with a team practicing customer intimacy.

In the next post, I’ll address the final of the three key customer related processes to reengineer: Relationship Management.