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Information Need |
A major Telecommunications manufacturer needed to
better understand the customer/vendor interface with one of its "new"
type of customers. This was an "old school" manufacturer,
and as such was unused to the speed their new customers were moving, and the
demands they were placing upon the manufacturer's ability to provide quality
and timely support.
Not unlike getting into a business relationship with a company from a
different culture, this telecommunications manufacturer professed to being lost
in their dealings with its new clients, clients that represented a fast
moving, risk taking, need-the-product-yesterday attitude towards business.
These new clients were definitely shaking up the old style of doing business,
and the manufacturer needed to determine the critical, competitive issues about
the relationship that mattered most, even as the relationship continued to grow.
What better way to determine this than to have a number of discussions with company
decision makers and front line employees on both sides of the
relationship.
Note: It is often the case that a vendor is smart enough to
know that s/he cannot understand what is happening, not for a lack of trying or
intelligence, but simply because the problem is conceptually or emotionally different
than the norm. Hiring an outside observer is often a quick and inexpensive
strategy to solve the problem. An outsider comes upon the scene lacking the
relational paradigm that is clouding the leader's perspective, and leaves providing
the decision maker an explanatory structure that can bring an issue into focus, which
is what happened here. |
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