Building Rapport

Hey

How are you doing?

You may have seen some LinkedIn posts from me a couple of weeks ago, where I talked about the Essential Skills (sometimes called soft skills), about being a consultant.

TL;dr - React web app to assist consultants in a client/consultant relationship available from this repo - https://github.com/jondoesflow/reactchatbotv2

Introduction

One of the main areas that I think is super important is building rapport. Building rapport leads into the empathy element of Design Thinking. It is vital in those initial conversations, from pre sales, to initial requirement workshops all the way through each client engagement and beyond.

Mentoring opportunity

I have recently been taking part in the 90 Day Mentoring challenge, run by the amazing Mark and Meg Smith. On this course, I have learnt a lot. Probably more so than any course in a similar time frame.

One of the cohort, Cam Munro, reached out to me and asked if I could mentor him. I was really blown away by the ask and jumped at the opportunity.

Cam lives in Australia, I’m in the UK and time zones are a bit of an issue. One of the tools Mark Smith put us on to is Loom. Loom is an asynchronous meeting tool, where you can record videos and share with others. Seriously, it’s one of the best tools I’ve come across. I am a fully paid up member now.

Anyway, Cam’s main ask was to try and help him with use cases that he could then take and build something in Dataverse and a Model Driven App.

In comes Chat GPT !

I created a custom GPT that pretends to be a client in whatever industry the consultant wants, it asks them their passion and then builds an idea around that vertical, with all its challenges; problems and with an added bit of humour.

The custom GPT required a Chat GPT plus subscription and I wanted to make this available to more than just those subscribers.

React

As some people may know, I am no pro-coder, so I subscribed to GitHub Copilot and it walked me through in building a React web app on VS Code, this allowed me to call the Open AI endpoint whilst removing the barrier of entry for Chat GPT plus subscription (albeit you would need an API key from https://platform.openAI.com

I was blown away by this. Really learnt a lot. I have now been able to create a GitHub repository which allows people to download and use this react web app.

You can find the repository here - https://github.com/jondoesflow/reactchatbotv2

I’d love your feedback, please get in touch - jon@jondoesflow.com