My Learnings from my first Client Interaction
Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.
As of now, I am currently working as a Research Engineer in a reputed Company who does all his work from the shadows. My work mainly involves bug fixing of existing codebase, feature enhancements as per requirements, designing prototypes and implementing the projects currently under development. My work mainly involved coding, designing, and testing. Hence, there was no customer/client interaction until now.
By the way, I am the curator of the CodesMyth, an online platform for simplifying codes & Breaking Myths
So, I was looking for a break from all this coding stuff and finally, I was given a task for Transfer Of Technology(TOT) of a technology that we developed.
Let me tell you about the situation. Let’s say there are 2 companies.
Company A: I am the employee of company A and let’s say the product that we have developed is X.
Company B: Company B is a client who has developed certain products like Y and Z which needs to be integrated with our product X. This whole setup should be handed to Company C.
Company C: Company where the final product and technologies will be delivered.
So, in a way Company B needs to have proper knowledge of their products(Y and Z) as well as our products(X) for them to sell this complete package to Company C.
So, this transfer of knowledge about the product that we have created to another party who has no prior knowledge of our product is called a Transfer of Technology (TOT). In a way, it involves letting them know on how it works at a basic level, fixing a small bug, installing the product, taking logs for efficient debugging and basic workflow.
However, the key learning for me via this TOT are:
Since their demands were very specific, I had to make some changes in order to make our product compatible with their demands, I learned that we had missed on certain parts which were never observed as those scenarios never occurred.
Before delivering, We thought that we had handled every possible scenario that can possibly occur, but I guess true perfection is not possible when things are done manually. This is at least true in case of coding. There is always something EXTRA that you can do, to make your code efficient, bug-free and reducing memory allocation and leaking along with code optimizations.
In the Office, all our conversations are generally in our native languages. However, there were some linguistic as well as language differences between us(Me and the Clients). So, it really made me understand the need to learn as well as have a proficiency in a common language[ofcourse, English] in order to allow a fluent communication.
I ended up making some new friends and understood the way of their working in their company and thinking and handling situations tactically as this can be considered of a small version of Field Scenario.
Ended up Increasing my confidence after learning some cool technologies and protocols along with the knowledge of how their product was implemented, basic workflow and code maintenance.
Got to know that client handling is not as easy as it looks. Although coding/developing and customer handling are totally different, an understanding of both is really required.
In a way, after doing this, It feels like one should welcome opportunities that challenge the way we think about ourselves and result in a better learning, growth, and mindset. We should not act as a hurdle for the opportunities that may enter our life because we don’t know when what will help us.
Keep Developing, Keep Learning. Just Remember,
Change is the end result of all true learning.
