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Treating Suppliers and Vendors — an Indicator of a Culture

I recall doing business with a company that refused to honour a signed contract.

The CEO let me know in no uncertain terms that the signature of the Chairman held no water because “he didn’t know what he was doing,” and that “I should know that.” It was an ugly situation, and I have done no business with that company since then, but their advertising that is filled with messages about how great their company culture is still reminds me of the disparity.

I have always remembered this event, and it’s led me to conclude something about companies: that they are good as how they treat their vendors.

Why so?

Mahatma Gandhi said: “The best test of a civilised society is the way in which it treats its most vulnerable and weakest members.”

I say that the corporate corollary is “the best test of a well-developed corporate culture is the way in which it treats its vendors.”

Not shareholders, employees or customers… but vendors: suppliers, contractors and consultants.

The same company I mentioned above had a habit of beating down every price that I ever presented to it. I sometimes felt like a thief trying to get away with something, rather than a business partner.

They were proud of the fact that they put their customers first, and would very quickly interrupt a meeting with a vendor to meet with a customer who had a problem of some kind. After all, they put customers first.

However, I think they missed the point of the customer revolution, as do many companies. The point is not that customers come first, but it is that the company can treat every human being that it engages in business with respect, dignity and care. The revolution was meant to show companies that focusing on themselves only resulted in poor performance in the mid to long term.

In this sense, vendors are no less important than customers.

And, in a way, vendors are among the weakest members of a company’s stakeholders as they must wait for payment from companies that lose invoices, have inefficient bureaucracies, force cuts in prices to make greater profits, and treat suppliers like thieves.

The joke is that I am also reluctant to do business with the same company as a customer, and would think twice before recommending them to a friend. I have heard other vendors express the same sentiment about the treatment they received from the company, and I imagine that they, too, would feel the same way.

I imagine that if they understood that we are all connected, and that here in the Caribbean the small size of our economies means that we cannot hide from each other, our corporations would act very differently towards its suppliers.

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Networking vs. Building a Network

It seems that people who get caught up in the idea of “networking” can get confused about the goals of their efforts.

It’s easy to think that it has something to do with socializing, selling, making friends or liming. These activities all have their place, but they don’t accomplish much in the long term.

Instead, the purpose of the activity is to “build a network.”

The word “build” is important here. It implies the slow but steady expansion of something that starts off small, but eventually turns into something substantial.

Of course, once the network is built, it must be carefully pruned, fed and maintained to help it thrive. In this way, a good networker is more of a careful gardener than anything else, who has the patience to allow small actions to produce large results over time.

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Press Release — Upcoming Customer Experience Speech

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A NEW FOCUS ON CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE COMING

Companies are betting that a new focus on “experience” will help them better serve local customers

One of the major trends in the world of customer service seems to making in roads in Jamaican corporations. Instead of merely serving customers, companies are hoping that by going after a precise experience they will be able to motivate employees, raise standards and provide customers with more of what they are looking for in their interactions with companies.

Local companies such as Scotiabank, Cable and Wireless and Victoria Mutual have all recently appointed high level executives in charge of “Customer Experience.” They understand what many companies are trying to grasp: the customer’s experience is impacted by every single “touch-point” or interaction they have with a company, including their website, the front-line staff, how they pay their bills or make deposits, and even what they see in their advertising.

On November Wednesday 21st, Francis Wade of Framework Consulting will be addressing the Jamaica Customer Service Association’s International Certificate Graduation, and will be describing this important shift in emphasis that is already positively impacting service standards in the Caribbean region.

According to Wade, “Employees across the board are finding it much easier to appreciate this new approach. Companies are finding that they can tap into an employee’s understanding of “experience” more easily than they can describe to them what happens in some far away company they have never visited.”

“Managers that are still talking about Walt Disney or the Ritz Carlton are speaking over employee’s heads, and are having a hard time relating to their daily experience of the service they experience from their minibus driver, post office, bank and grocery store.”

By adapting this new best practice, local companies are able to do what many companies around the world have done, and start with a set of “target experiences” that the company has decided will support its brand. Once these experiences are defined, they are translated into standards at each “touch-point.” Employees are taught how to deliver these experiences consistently, and how to monitor the customer’s reaction with a combination of advanced interpersonal skills and personal intuition.

Websites are tweaked, process are changed –all in order to produce the particular experiences. Wade said “Managers who think that they can motivate employees by speaking about the service they experienced at their last trip to Sandals are mistaken. They don’t appreciate that a major reason that front-line employees deliver better service in North American companies, for example, is that they have many, many examples of good service that they have seen first hand.”

“They merely have to copy the service levels that they see every day. In Jamaica, employees cannot do the same, and their job is much, much harder.”