What is the best part of business trips?

Do you go on business trips? What is the best part of business trips? What is the worst part?

My biggest pleasures of business trips are to meet unknown people and unexpected things. However, if you know my purpose of my trips, you would probably be surprised.

I am a manager who leads a technical support team for S/W on PC and has one or two times of business trips every month to visit my customers. The main purpose of business trip is trouble shooting that my staff can't fix. In other words, the almost all customers whom I have to visit are facing critical situations.

About four years ago, an automotive supplier in Shizuoka was my turning point. I visit the customer to report a S/W quality assurance system of my company, because the critical bug in my product were detected on the customers’ evaluation process and damaged the confident of both the product and the company. Whether the company was possible to recover the confident depended on my response. If my response would not had satisfied in the customer’s requirement, the customer would have stop using the product and would have chosen competitor’s one.

The customer’s office located on the top of beautiful hill. The office was surrounded by tea tree farm. On the way to the office, I saw a lot of small wind mills in the tea tree files and talked to sales guy who followed me to the customer. “Which direction is the wind blowing from? With wind or against?”, “Hope with wind”. He said. We kept quit because that our visit was a kind of negotiation that we were not allowed to lose.

The meeting was filled in a gloomy atmosphere. At the end of the meeting, the director asked us the cause of bugs. Are bugs generated by an individual or an organization? The question was very hard to answer. Even though I chose any option, the director would doubt S/W quality assurance system was not enough.

After long silence, he began to speak the problem he held. The bugs had been repeated by the same cause. He told us honestly that he didn’t find the good way to avoid it. We discussed way of testing and reviewing as S/W engineer over a relationship between clients and suppliers and shared the difficulty of developing high quality S/W product.

Till then, I hadn’t found the pleasure in trouble shooting, but I changed my mind. Though I exchange a lot of mails with customer every day, those are technical problems. It is very hard to catch root causes and their thinking that they hold.

Now, I think business trip for trouble shootings are good opportunities to understand the customers deeply even though the customer were upset by the trouble. I’m also sure that it’s easy to build good relationship with customer after visiting them.

Compared with the best part and the worst part, it’s difficult to find the worst. If I were to point it, someone who can’t catch me at my office call me while I’m spending relaxing time after a critical negotiation. Those are probably overseas calls. The calls dispossess my relaxing time of drinking beer seeing nice view in Shinkansen. It is just another pleasure among Japanese business people.