Customer Communications - Your reputation on the wire.

The first step toward becoming a trusted advisor to your clients is ensuring that you have consistent, timely and actionable information going out to your customers.  It is key that you understand that the information you provide is going to be used as the basis for your customer's business planning.

A common mistake is to start to use this as an opportunity to spin or otherwise manipulate bad news or create a buying need.  This is about giving your customers information that they can reliably use to plan their own business activities. Here are my guidelines for  release management:

When developing your communications plan, start by planning the timing and content of your message.  A good guideline is: "say what you'll do, do what you say and then say what you've done."  

Say what you'll do:

If you're a salesperson, do not be tempted to sell futures.  Sell what is in the box or suffer the consequences of losing your reputation.  If your product isn't what the customer needs yet, they will respect you far more for being honest, than leading them down a path that creates risk for their project or programs success.  Enough customers have experienced this pain before and may very well be willing to stage their deployment into phases if they can be confident that they will be able to predict when they can expect each necessary function.  If you are finding opportunities that you must have (x featureset) to be able to close, that is your responsibility to communicate back into the product organization.  Remember, relationships are built on trust and you will suffer more if you are wrong ("you lied to me!") and have nothing to gain if you are right in the eyes of your customer.  You have a responsibility to be the advocate for your customer and that means proposing the best solution given the information that you have.

You must be conservative in what you promise.  If you have concerns that something about your release is on the bubble - scope, time, quality - then you absolutely must quickly and accurately adjust communications around those dimensions.  Customers, especially IT consumers have become accustomed to delays in first releases, unfortunately they've also become accustomed to additional slips.  Don't think that means that they'll tolerate them.

Give yourselves some time. You've probably had some past metrics to relate back to, if not find someone who does. Are you consistently late by 20%? Talk to your product team and suggest that a buffer be built in then.  Do you consistently chop major functionality to make your schedule?  Reduce the communicated scope based on the items that are least at risk. It's very unlikely you will be punished for delivering early or with more in the box if you aren't consistently doing so.  Conversely, if you consistently are way off your deliverables than your customers will already be modifying their expectations based on their history. Its all about predictability.  

Do what you say:

If things go awry, be honest.  Don't try to spin your way out of it.  Take responsibility and explain what is being done to correct the problems.  You don't have to tell anything gory and embarassing, but it will be appreciated that you are willing to provide greater visibility to your customers.  Again, this is about building trust and sometimes that means exposing your hand.

Stay on top of it. There is no excuse for missing a deliverable and not having communicated or at least planned for the communcations strategy in advance.  Stay in communications with your product team (provide feedback only, not demands) and become a trusted advisor to them as well. You are the face of the company to the customer, and you're the face of the customer to the company. It is important that inside and outside you are considered a reliable channel for communication that will not mislead or abuse the information you are given.  You should always try to maintain a positive attitude and be supportive in your interactions, but a duck is a duck no matter what you try to call it.  It is essential to maintain your integrity through out each interaction.

Tip: If your deliverable is truly providing value, there are customer activities that are being planned around your release (if there aren't you've got bigger problems), so remember a failure on your part to meet expectations is likely to be a failure on your customers part.  Your customer's success based on the products or services you provide is the best predictor of your success.

Say what you did:

Keeping this in mind, don't wait around to tell your customers (or market) what is delivered. This is an accomplishment and even if it wasn't pretty, you have delivered additional value to your customers. Let them know so that they can take action or plan to take action on it. Also, be sure to provide the value statements, this allows your customer to do their own promotions.  "See how smart we were to make this decision? Look at what we got!"  This messaging will be a little different from previous rounds, as you can now apply the polish.  Remember, history always looks more favorably on the victors.