So make time to visit your customers, its one of the most valuable tool at your disposal. Observe how they use your products; you will be blown away by what you see and learn !! Here are some guidelines for making a customer visit.  Make sure you take a couple of other people( no more than 3 – including you), maybe from engineering or your co-worker, with you. One is, they can benefit from the insight into this visit as well  and second is  you can appoint one of them as a scribe to take notes and other to take pictures, as you observe and ask questions.

1. If  the purpose of your visit is a specific one – e.g. attempt to learn about a particular pain point, make sure you prepare probing questions ahead of time.  The questions should be fairly open-ended; donot put words in your customer’s mouth.

2. Make sure you have called them before hand and taken a prior appointment. No matter how much your customers love you or your product, they are not going to like it if you just show up in their office on a sunny morning.

3. Arrive on time. There’s nothing more horrible than making your customer wait for you.

4. Carry a copy of a bi-lateral NDA, to be signed by both you and your customer, before the meeting starts. This NDA prohibits both you and your customer from discussing each other’s business details in public.

5. Carry a camera to take pictures of your customer and their site. But make sure you have obtained permission from them prior to taking any picutres.

6. Start by explaining the purpose of your visit to the customer and give them the agenda for the meeting.

7. Let the customer use your product in front of you as he/she would normally do.  Observe them very closely. Take pictures intermittently of their actions, documents, screen shots, office setup, etc.

8. Ask them to explain to you what they are doing and why. Probe them at every step, but without annoying them. Take diligent notes and be very patient. This may be good time to practice your listening skills.

9. Donot attempt to help them, if they get stuck. Observe the problem they are facing using your product and how they attempt to resolve it.

10. Give them some time to get through it and do discuss the issue later.

11. Be curteous; respect your customer’s time and make sure you end the meeting when you are supposed to, actually few mins before, leaving time to exchange pleasantries.

12. Once you are done with the meeting. Compile all your notes and any samples or other artifacts that you may have collected from the customer

13. Thank the customer and give them some incentive (gift cards, free products from your company, etc) for having spent their valuable time with you.

14. Lastly, leave your contact information with them, if you havent done so already and discuss any action item(s) resulting from the meeting.

15. After you get back to your office, systematically document your findings, attaching all the artifacts to this doc.

16. Donot forget to share this knowledge with other members of the team. 

Over time, this repository of your customer meetings can become a gold mine, which you can dig from time to time to find nuggets of valuable information.

 One important thing to remember is to not to make this visit into a support call. Donot attempt to solve any of your customer problems during this visit, that should either be a separate call or routed to a different channel.