Introduction and discovery overview
Customer discovery is an ongoing process. Discovery is performed at the pre-sales stage, during project kickoff, and is continued though the iterations of your solution building. Knowing your customer, how they think, and what they need are vital ingredients to the success of a project.
The most important question that you can ask during the discovery process is: "Why?"
Occasionally, however, that question must be asked in different ways.
For example, when a customer says, "We need a button on this screen to do this thing," your why question might sound more like, "What do users need to have happen after completing their tasks on this screen?"
This module covers the following topics:
Starting with initial customer discovery, a process that often happens before they are actually your customers.
Managing customer discovery meetings by preparing in advance and having a plan for what happens next.
Listening to an interview between two solution architects on how they communicate with customers.
Evaluating customer needs and how that process is more than simply marking items on a checklist as complete. Additionally, this topic examines how you can add value and meet customer requirements.
Introducing your customer
This module refers to the customer Woodgrove Bank, and the exercises and discussions throughout the lesson relate to this customer and how you can help them.
Woodgrove Bank has offices in 14 US States in addition to an office in the UK and another in Germany. Woodgrove Bank is a leading global financial services provider with an emphasis on commercial lending and investments. Administrative users work in the office and are never mobile. However, all mid-level managers need to be able to work from their home offices or while on site with a client. The team at Woodgrove feels overwhelmed with their disparate systems; therefore, they are looking for a solution that connects their data in a way that boosts financial success and customer satisfaction. With an internal-facing only deployment, Woodgrove Bank would have fewer regulatory concerns; however, each team within the bank would have their own responsibilities.
The following table describes Woodgrove Bank's customer-facing teams.
| Team | Description |
|---|---|
| Business Growth and Asset Management | Commercial Accounts with less than $1B in annual transactions. Growth in this sense refers to the loans used to reinvest in the corporation. These customers share a group of account managers; they are not specifically assigned to an individual. |
| Fortune 500 | Each customer in this division is assigned a senior account manager as their primary contact for all banking matters. Once a company is managed in this division, they remain here; even if they roll off the Fortune 500. |
| Group Portfolio Management | This team manages the parent/child accounts for firms with multiple organizations under a common umbrella. |
| New Business Development | This division is primarily marketing for new business. Once an account is qualified and active, it moves on to the appropriate management team. |
| Public Sector/Government/Higher Education | Woodgrove is a preferred lender to many sovereign governments around the globe as well as private universities. This team also tends to the handful of high-volume non-profits serviced by the bank. |
| Consumer Lending | This team is the smallest as Woodgrove focuses on commercial products. However, high volume consumer lending is available on a case by case basis. This team is not advertised to external prospects, but mostly utilized by the executives of corporate clients. |
| Relationship Managers | This team consists of members of each of the other teams, this ensures a consistent experience as accounts may move between teams and interact in other ways. This team also establishes best practices for users. |
| Escalation Call Center | The bank runs a 24/7/365 call center. They have a five-person team (one manager and four CSRs) in each of Chicago, Frankfurt and two teams in an outsourced center in Manila (the Philippines) doing an early and late shift to cover the APAC region. |
In addition to these teams, Woodgrove Bank has the standard set of C-Suite Executives who are involved with overall bank operations and supporting the teams as needed.
Woodgrove Bank is hoping to have the new system in a pilot phase so that the CEO can present initial results to the annual general meeting (AGM) in four months' time.