Sometimes old technology is the best technology. Consider customer intimacy. Customer intimacy is the cornerstone of any strong company. Without a cohesive bond between your business -- and every process in your business -- and your customer, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful. And believe it or not, in my 20 years of developing technology solutions for IT professionals, I still haven't found a better tool for understanding customers than the phone.

Let's take a step back. Customer intimacy isn't just a label we give to programs to get IT professionals to buy our products, it’s actually a series of continuous loop initiatives that ensure our main focus is solving a pain point for our users. Reaching out to customers is important because good ideas very rarely come from within. That is, customers drive innovation. Sure, our developers are strong at building slick user interfaces and intuitive ways to surface value on our products, but the baseline problems that we 're trying to solve always come from our customers.

How does this continuous feedback and request loop occur? First, it needs to be part of the core values of your company and it should never be an afterthought. It’s a mentality that drives everything you do. Every new feature we introduce is vetted through this feedback loop. Second, customer intimacy is part of the job description of our product management team. Their job performance is specifically measured on customer intimacy objectives, among other factors. Let me give you a few examples.

An important feature in our network management software is a context-sensate “Give Feedback” button. No matter where the user is in the application, he or she can provide feedback based on a specific feature, the way a feature works, why the product doesn't meet his or her expectations, and where the feature needs to be improved. Most importantly, all users have the opportunity to request new features.

Once a collection of similar new features requests comes in, an internal process is kicked off for internal review. Once a week the product management team takes this collection of feedback from our automated feedback system and debates the merits of the features requested. The next step is to reach out to those customers to ask specific questions about the features they have requested. These are phone conversations and we may have hundreds of these discussions so we better understand the requests.

Having phone conversations with your customers solves two problems. First, it gives you better understanding of their requests, and second it demonstrates that you are serious about their business and their concerns. While we have developed a strong technology platform within our software to interact with our customers, sometimes it’s better to remember that old technology is the best technology. Pick up the phone and dial. Your customers want to hear from you!