Using Trust To Nurture Customers Into Fans

Procurement has existed as a business practice for hundreds of years and now enjoys wide recognition with representative trade associations and university courses. It is accepted as a skill that can be learned and practiced by professionals. It’s no secret that outsourcing emerged from the practice of procurement, but it surprises me that in 2019 there are some executives who still believe that they are the same thing.

Think for a moment about the key attributes of procurement - selecting suppliers, vetting suppliers, creating contracts, creating payment terms, creating measurements for service levels, negotiating contracts, and actually acquiring products.

That does all sound quite similar to outsourcing, but then consider the big difference. With an outsourcing contract you are buying into a long-term relationship. You are building a partnership with a supplier that has specialist skills, not just ordering 10,000 boxes of Post-It notes for the office inventory.

When procuring products it is easy to compare suppliers side by side. Price and time to supply the product can be compared knowing the product will be the same whoever delivers it. None of this is true when you are looking at an ongoing relationship with a supplier that is offering expertise you don’t have internally. In fact, to my mind, even the term outsourcing is getting a little dated. In the UK the biggest business journals focused on this area have both been renamed in recent years - Outsource became Future of Sourcing and Professional Outsourcing became Intelligent Sourcing. Clearly sourcing is the future of outsourcing.

But think about the complexity of the modern customer journey and then consider how a customer service specialist needs to be completely integrated into the value chain of your company. There was a time when the contact centre was a distinct and separate function that could be specified and handled by a third party. Now a customer might be in touch with your brand a year before they ever purchase anything, during a purchase, or many years after a purchase, and using every possible channel from WhatsApp to social networks to online chat - and even a good old phone call.

Interactions with customers today are no longer limited to post-sale customer service or complaints. Your customer interactions form part of an engagement pattern that builds over many years into a relationship between the brand and customer. These interactions can in fact be broken down by drivers and managed by sales, marketing, PR, or customer service, but the customer does not care about how you manage engagement or who is providing the engagement, so long as they always get help when they need it.

So the reality is that your customer service function is nurturing customer relationships long before the customer ever makes a purchase, is guiding the customer through a purchase, and it keeping in touch with a customer and creating loyalty and advocacy post-sale.

Finding a partner who can manage all this is certainly not about asking the procurement director to find the lowest bid in a comparison of suppliers. You need to find a partner that understand what you want to achieve, how you plan to go about it, and how you can work together so the supplier can bring ideas and innovation to the deal. You need to trust your supplier because they probably know about the behaviour of your own customers better than you do.

You not only need to stimulate the initial interest of your customer, but then keep them interested and engaged, understand what they need, predict what they need next, guide them to a purchase, then maintain a long lasting relationship. This needs expertise, but it also need a lot of data on customer behaviour and the ability to analyse and make sense of both behavioural and contextual data.

Teleperformance DIBS is a great example of an organisation that has matured long ago from being seen as just a supplier - companies working with our DIBS team see them as experts they can trust. Last year the Teleperformance DIBS team handled over 600m customer interactions across the world in over 25 languages. If you are building a strategy that aims to manage how you can develop longer-lasting trusted customer relationships then why not apply the same approach to your partners too?

If you work with partners, rather than just suppliers, then your customer journey can be transformed; you should be nurturing customers so they mature into fans – only a supplier with a deep knowledge of your business and customer journey can hope to achieve this. Forget about outsourcing; let’s talk about partnership.

Photo by Drew Leavy licensed under Creative Commons.