Dates & LOCATION
 December 3-4, 2008 / San Diego, CA

BACKGROUND

Why This Seminar Is Important To You:

Often customers can’t tell you what they really want – yet unspoken needs not only drive buying behavior, they are a powerful source of new product innovation. Product developers who know how to tap into these needs are steps ahead of the competition.

Everything from knowing what to ask, whom to ask, and how to ask is critical. Just talking with customers, while admirable, can actually lead you astray if done incorrectly. That’s why Getting Voice of the Customer Right: Mastering the Art of Customer Visits will examine how to conduct customer visits – where you can personally enter the world of your customers and learn about their unspoken needs through direct interaction. Programmatic customer visits for product development have been a business practice for over twenty years and if executed successfully, can generate unique customer perspectives that would be difficult to gain from other VOC activities. Focused on best practices and key criteria for success, this seminar will provide participants with practical, step-by-step guidelines to successfully design, conduct and analyze a program of customer visits – specifically, it will prepare you for how to select the right customers, ask the right kinds of questions and uncover needs that customers don’t know how to vocalize. In an economic climate plagued by fickle customers, fierce competition and product proliferation, you cannot afford not to master the art of conducting successful customer visits.
 

Key Benefits

By attending this seminar, you will learn:

• When to do customer visits, when to do focus groups, and when it’s better engage in some other kind of market research entirely

• What it takes to gain organizational buy-in and how to do it

• How to calculate how many customers, across which segments, you need to visit in order to collect actionable data

• The importance of assembling a cross-functional team to conduct customer visits and how to prepare these teams to succeed

• How to design a discussion guide to maximize the effectiveness of a series of customer visits – know what topics to include and how to sequence them

• What customers can tell you (and what they can’t) - learn how to construct questions that uncover real insights

• How to assess the economic value of a proposed solution in the eyes of the customer

• That customer visits can serve dual purposes, both to gather customer input and build relationships

• Interview techniques that will help you identify needs that customers cannot vocalize – – and know when and how to probe further.

• Analytical tools for linking the voice of the customer to product design and key business decisions

Course Deliverables:
By attending this seminar, you will obtain:

1. Best practices for conducting customer visits aimed at gathering VOC data

2. Step-by-step guidelines to design, implement and analyze the results of a program of customer visits

3. Specific guidance and advice on how to combine customer visits with other market research techniques to improve business decisions

4. A reprint of Prof. McQuarrie’s book, Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus

5. Recommendations and advice for your specific customer visit program

Exclusive Workshop Offer! Every attendee of this workshop will receive a FREE REPRINT of Ed McQuarries landmark book, Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus. This book is currently out of print and hard to find...read about this book on Amazon