Customer Relationships Start with Forming (Phase 1)
It's All in the Team - Stella Pop
Customer relations starts with teaming, teaming with customers to take advantage market opportunities always follows interesting pattern. Group / Team development as proposed by Bruce Tuckman, an American Psychologist, was published back in the mid-1960s. The “Tuckman’s Stages” are Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing. He proposed that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, find solutions, plan work, and to deliver results. This is especially true when working with customers when exploring new media marketing campaigns and solutions.
The Tuckman model has become the basis for subsequent models of Team development and team dynamics and a management theory frequently used to describe the behavior of existing teams. In this segment, we explore the forming stage of the process.
The forming stage is step 1: The team meets and learns about the opportunity and challenges, and then agrees on goals and begins to tackle the tasks. Although team members may be motivated, they are usually relatively uninformed of the issues and objectives of the team. Therefore, early on, team members tend to behave quite independently looking to see where they might fit and what role they will play (“what is in this for me?”). Teams in this stage are usually on their best behavior but very focused on themselves. Mature team members begin to model appropriate behavior even at this early phase. In fact, sharing the concept of “Tuckman’s Stages” can be extremely helpful to the team.
The forming stage of any team is important because in this stage the members of the team get to know one another, exchange some personal information, and perhaps make new friends. This is also a good opportunity to see how each member of the team works as an individual and how they respond to pressure.
Anecdotal information is key here!!!! At Stella Pop we consider our customers as partners and more importantly as team members. Stella Pop is often viewed by our customers as coaches helping them to navigate the wild west show that is new media.
The next stage is Storming where different ideas are competing for consideration.
