Turning your researchers into consultants for your customers has at least three advantages. First, in ever more fierce global competition, your firm is selling not just a product but a product and technical service. Your customers will be speaking to or e-mailing someone whose work hours overlap with theirs facilitating communication. If both speak English as their first language, this can facilitate communicating as well. So you will be maintaining or improving technical service to your customers.
Second, turning your researchers into consultants can save them from job loss should their R&D programs be cut in this still difficult economic environment. Third, you retain access to their research capabilities when increased research funding becomes available. Fourth, as subject matter experts, researchers can develop training programs for customers. By introducing new technology to your customers, your firm may gain a step on your competitors in supplying customers' needs for this technology.
Finally, lab managers should consider having your researchers serve customers directly as consultants even when they have active research projects. Often the relationship between customer and supplier involves two handoffs, from the customer to the tech service specialist and from the tech service specialist to the researcher if the problem is a new or knotty one. By having researchers directly involved in the customer relationship, one of these handoffs is eliminated often improving speed and efficiency of response.
Rather than just being a products and technical service provider, your researchers can give your firm the opportunity to become collaborators and partners with your customers setting up a deeper, more mutually beneficial relationships that goes beyond simple cost per pound factors when contracts come up for renewal.
However, making your research consultants as well requires effort. Many times your researchers will have the necessary technical skills but need to learn the soft skills to interact with customers and manage the customer relationship. For example, staff members for whom English is a second language must lean to speak slowly and deliberately articulating words carefully. They will also need to learn how to read American body language.
Your staff members will need to develop active listening skills so they can ask the needed questions to get a full understanding of the customers' concerns. They must understand customers' needs and not simply give them what they ask for. This means becoming proactive and understanding the customer's needs even before they ask for help. From my own experience I know that nothing delights a customer as much as your coming to them with a solution to a problem they thought was a fact of life and had lived with for many years.
To become effective customer consultants, your staff members will need to manage customer relationships and understand the importance of deadlines. Should problems develop in meeting deadlines, the customer should know as soon as possible. Nothing destroys a customer's trust as quickly and thoroughly as a supplier who doesn't appears to be taking the customer's deadlines seriously. Again, speaking from personal experience I have tried to persuade some customers to give one of our products a plant trial for years. More often than not the only way we finally got these opportunities for new business was when a firm's current supplier didn't meet a deadline and didn't appear to be taking the customer seriously because they had the business "sewn up."
To consult effectively, your staff members must stay abreast of technological developments and trends not only in their own field and industry but also in the industries your firm serves. By both understanding the customer's technology and problems and coming from outside their industry, your researchers and tech service specialists can provide knowledge and a fresh perspective that contribute to effective problem solving.
