When I majored in Journalism in college, professors taught us to get "both sides" of a story.
The Reference Interview
When a client or prospect first submits our Contact form or calls or emails, it can be challenging to discern exactly what question they want answered or what problem they need solved.
Those misunderstandings can be headed off by the Reference Interview.
The Reference Interview probes deeper into the client's concerns and allows the Info Pro to determine the underlying reason for the client's call.
The process starts with a series of open-ended questions and follow-up questions to determine the source of the problem the client faces.
As the client answers each question, we listen and take notes until we believe we understand the issue.
We then repeat our understanding of what the client needs to confirm that we understand what we have been told.
As an example, a client could submit our contact form with a request to "find a new line of business application to replace the program that we have outgrown".
That seems straight-forward enough but the actual problem will be in the details.
In the Reference Interview we would begin to learn more about the scope of the project, the client's needs, and why the client believes the company has outgrown its current LOB program.
We could then proceed to what the client wants the new program to do for the business, what capabilities the company wants, whether the program should be cloud-based for remote workers, and whether there needs to be integration between departments (i.e., Marketing and Sales), etc.
We would then determine how much information the client wants in our recommendation. Say the client needs to go to a cloud-based program, does the client want information on the financial stability of each of the top choices? Given that the client's data will now be on the cloud provider's servers instead of in-house, financial problems or a breach at the cloud provider could render the client's data inaccessible for a period of time.
We would also want to know how the client best absorbs information, so we would ask whether they want an Executive Summary, the raw data, information in Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, or other file types. Does the client want to sit in demos or have us summarize the demos for them?
From there we would go on to the budget and the deadline.
The point of the Reference Interview is to avoid those misunderstandings that lead to answering the wrong questions, solving the wrong problems, or providing the wrong deliverables.
I am Eric Magill, an Information Professional. To put order to your information, Contact me for credible, current, proprietary, research-driven answers to the questions and problems your public or private sector organization faces. You can also request an online meeting with me.
