The customer is always right!

The customer IS always right! Unfortunately, this is NOT a customer – yet! As a consultant tasked with pleasing an aggressive sales team and understanding requirements from perspective customers, one often hears from the sales team that the customer is always right. What is often missing to the sales team is that the perspective customer is NOT yet a customer. Until one identifies requirements and arranges a payment or contract for certain deliverables, the perspective customer is a prospect. During this time, it is the task of the consultant to ensure a clear understanding of the identified requirements and the potential deliverables. This way the team ensures that the statement, “the customer is always right”, is reasonable and true for the customer, consultant, and sales.

An enterprise architect, clear requirements, and business objectives help – The desire to do some good remains. To do some good, one must meet the requirements of the recipient. Understanding and gathering these requirements is perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the enterprise management software vendor. In more than ten years as an enterprise management consultant, the ability to measure good delivered to any customers does not exist. The reason for this is the lack of deliverable business objectives. The lack of clear business objectives reflects the poor leadership within the enterprise management software companies and within the organizations looking to use these tools. Perhaps an enterprise architect is the answer!