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Three Models of Customer
Coaching1 |
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Bringing
Out The Product's Full Benefits:
educating customers about all the potential uses and
applications of the product.
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Shaping Up the Customer's Usage
Process: helping customers change their business
processes.
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Breaking New Ground With the Customer:
assisting your customers into new business ventures, thereby
enlarging your own market.
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Training and coaching creates a bond with
customers. It helps you learn know how your product is used and whether
there is any problem with it.
Case in Point
Dell
Inc.
"Our early Internet business was primarily consumer- and small
business-oriented because for many of those customers, purchasing online was
a natural next step after getting product information and price quotation
online," writes
Michael Dell2, Founder of
Dell Inc.
"Convincing corporate accounts to buy online, however, was much more
difficult. They felt we were asking them to radically change the way they
purchased. Many of our large customers have deeply ingrained purchasing
systems, and they didn't know how they could exchange information between
those systems and the Internet. Some were concerned about the security of
their information online. And for still others, the act of deciding what to
buy and the decision to actually buy it are two different events, often
handled by at least two different people or departments. we solved the
problem by creating a purchasing process that allowed the two events to be
handled separately."
"Driving
change in your own organization is hard enough;
driving change in other organizations is nearly impossible. But I believed –
and still believe – that the Internet would become as pervasive and
invaluable as the telephone. We knew it was too important to our business -
and potentially, to our customers' business – to wait for them to figure it
out for themselves. So we assumed the responsibility of educating our
customers on the basic benefits of doing things electronically."
"Our account reps were our educating mechanism.
They asked customers, "How are you doing business with Dell today?" The
message we needed to get across was that ordering online simplifies things:
There's less chance for error in making an order and a better means of
tracking it. Ordering online is more efficient because it funnels the same
information through one route rather than three. That one route is a
customized page on our website called "Dell Premier Pages."2
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