Tuesday, July 6, 2010

A Lesson in talking to customers

Last week we got a visit from some of our suppliers. They had a new version of firmware that they needed to role out across their existing hardware (it seems a component had changed which required them to update the firmware). As is quite understandable, they had taken this opportunity to add loads more features that they wanted to discuss with us, and help us through some of the other code changes we needed to make to support this level of firmware.

The trouble was, all of these features were useless to us, it was heartbreaking. I understand the pride you feel when you are showing of a feature that you think is great, i get it a lot. But these features weren't needed by us at all. But it's too late. It now looks like we're being forced into an upgrade - which is going to take a lot fo effort on the part of our company (development and roll out/ upgrade costs)and are unlikely to go with this supplier on the next project we do.

It goes to show. Talk to your customers!

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