TVP – Metric 30 Customer Contact Time

Background | User Guide | Program Contents | Stakeholders | List of Metrics

1. Metric Definition

A simple count of time (hours or fractional days) spent with the customer (either internal, or external customers, as appropriate).

A major concern in corporate America is that R&D output be relevant to the businesses which it supports. There are several metrics which can be enforced to assure that R&D is satisfying its immediate customers in the corporation. These include: strategic alignment; business funding of R&D projects; customer satisfaction; and customer contact time. The Customer Contact Time  metric is normally a simple count of time (hours or fractional days) spent with the customer. The time may be counted for R&D management and scientists separately, as well as in a total for all customer engagement time. Note that the term “customer” can refer to both internal customers as well as external customers.

2. Advantages and Limitations

The amount of time that scientists on research staff spend with customers appears to correlate well with successful innovation in many companies. Probably the more normal scenario for contact will be with internal customers. With strategic planning maturing in many corporations, businesses today are able to share relatively accurate long-term plans with R&D, which can give the R&D organization an insight into competitive requirements in the future.

Correspondingly, R&D can highlight differentiating technologies which can provide future competitive advantage. A metric which enforces the regular association of R&D with internal customers ensures that this regular communication occurs. A metric which counts contact time with external or end customers may be especially desirable in certain industries.

A limitation is that simply counting contact time provides only a quantitative measure of interaction time. It does not ensure that the time spent with customers produces the desired result of coupling business and market needs into technological planning and alignment efforts.

3. How to Use the Metric

A simple method is to count hours spent with customers in conferences or meetings. Most contact metrics will probably be with respect to the internal customer, since R&D will normally rely on business and marketing sources to translate the end-user needs into technology or functional requirements. There may be a separate count for managers spending time with counterparts in the businesses or in marketing, as well as for scientists. In some organizations, the process of converting end-customer needs to product requirements may impose special end-customer contact requirements on R&D. In this case, there might be metrics for both end-customer and immediate-customer (business) contact time.

4. Options and Variations

An alternative is to count functions as the contact metric. For example, the R&D organization may have a steering committee (or several technology- or business-related steering committees) which meet regularly. The regularity and frequency of these meetings may be a key strategic metric. Also, R&D organizations may have operations reviews with selected customers regularly to discuss progress on key projects. Counting these meetings may be an acceptable way to judge customer contacts in a class of projects which are entering the mature (near development) stage.

5. Champions and Contacts

6. References