The plan

In many organizations, customer visits are not planned to elicit feedback, but are rather a reaction to an event (typically a negative one) or are part of the sales process. As a result, there is no consistent quantifiable data that comes out of these visits, but they are rather a necessity of running the day-to-day business.

For those organizations that do plan customer visits as part of exploratory research, quite often these visits remain unstructured and are typically opportunistic. For most businesses, customer visits are also very expensive as there are many costs involved, including travel, expenses, and most importantly, time.

To successfully embark on a customer visit initiative, it is necessary to develop and quantify the goals you are hoping to achieve and formulate a plan to achieve the goals, thereby justifying the expenditure of time and resources that the company will be investing. A plan for customer visits that are designed to elicit customer feedback outside of...