Tuesday, December 9, 2008

friend's conversation

Yesterday, my friend asked me to attend conversation with customer. This session was meant to improve my skill on providing consulting. There are several things that I caught of being consultant.

  1. Understand Customer's problem.
    This is very important and also the thing that most of the people and me, are missed. Understanding what problem they have and based on the well defined problem that they have. Consultant will try to think about what actually the solution is.

    Most of the time Customer tries to explain what are their problem, but they usually are not well organized on telling all of your problem. Thus, it is job of consultant to manage them. For example: they tell that they have a problem of documenting certain project, they want to have a tool to document a project is available and published in internet and bla...bla..bla and maybe they want everything in the tool. As a consultant, Consultant needs to drive him to the correct path. What actually their problem is, dont let them navigate you. Filtering the problem and prioritizing their problem based on their business is very important so that we can solve their problem and of course it will make their business successful.

  2. Manage customer to the correct path.
    As I explain, most of the time customer tells you all of the thing they need, all of the problem that they have, but they tells you in unwell organized. This is job for consultant to manage their problem and solve their problem.


    Navigate them is very important for consultant so that we can limit and focus on their problem which relates to their business. If consultant is driven by customer, the solution of the problem will take a long time to implement and of course the impact is customer's business will slow down as probably their problems are too much to solve. Thus, filtering and managing the problem are very important to do in the world of consultancy.

  3. Use a communicative way to communicate with customer.
    Yeah, maybe for some people, this is quite difficult to do. You get to communicate what is in your mind to customer, communicate what is the solution to customer. Communication is playing the important role of providing consultancy. The above activities which I have explained, would be useless if the way we communicate to customer is not understandable. Structuring the problem, structuring the solution are also part of well communication. You could use any media to communicate your solution. This is a tentative way to do and seems to depend on the situation. There may be a customer wants to have a slide to elaborate the problem and explain the solution or maybe there is another better media to communicate them.


If there is something that I miss or wrong, It would be great for those who read this blog to give me a feedback, I appreciate it much.