Vendors may need to spend significant time at customer sites or telecommuting. It is, therefore, prudent to touch on a few crucial considerations in this bonding phase. While a particular interaction approach may be acceptable at one customer, other customers may not appreciate the same system. The size of the customer organization typically influences accepted practice.

At the onset of the engagement, convey to your customer that you are conscious of customer end protocols and would like to know them as and when relevant. An organization’s culture drives protocols. Employees observe, ask, learn, and follow protocols customarily at their respective organizations, after being with the same organization for many months, years, or decades. Vendor personnel’s interaction time with customer organizations is much limited compared and may need to be apprised of relevant protocols explicitly. These protocols could be seemingly insignificant, requiring page numbers, font size, and type in every customer-facing documentation or presentation. Others could be a chain of communication and meeting set up-related protocols. For example, the decision to cancel an appointment involving multiple customer resources may require explicit and strict approval from customer contact, even if another key customer stakeholder has agreed to cancel the meeting.

Also, always focus on executing your work successfully with minimal distractions. Participate in as few meetings as possible but stay informed about other areas of the project and company operations.

Always be in continuous learning mode. Observe new technologies, processes, policies, and procedures and share them with your colleagues in your organization. This approach will increase visibility for you and help your vendor organization serve your customers better.

Key Takeaways:

 Take your customer contact’s guidance to understand and follow customer end interaction protocols

 Always be in continuous learning mode

 Avoid distractions and stay focused on your assigned tasks

 Stay informed about other areas of the project and operations

Customer Touchpoint Frequency

Right after a vendor sells a software solution, there is natural eagerness and pressure from all stakeholders to implement and deploy it. Most customers write contracts to realize implementations faster. The vendor is naturally active and incented to realize this end goal sooner than later.

For project coordinators, I suggest putting an indefinitely reoccurring weekly status meeting on the calendar to review project progress every week. This meeting on the calendar will keep all stakeholders on point until the implementation is complete. It is okay to repurpose the forum for execution-related conversations. Of course, after the stakeholders complete the project, the reoccurring meeting can be deleted.