Gone are the days of the crusty old purchasing guy that cut POs while grumbling about those &%#@! customers.  Well, at least mostly...  As us procurement folks continue to "professionalize" our profession, and organizations like ISM set their certification bars higher, our customers are more and more looking to us as solution providers.  And that's what we've been striving for.  Now that we're "arriving," we need to step up to the plate...

My organization is trying to make that leap.  We have a superb customer service program in place--called "Listen, Understand, Communicate, and Then Deliver."  Here's the logo, that really does a superb job of graphically implying the stages of serving a customer.  In other words, you don't really get the full picture or come full circle until you've progressed through the stages.


(c) 1998 NRECA.  All rights reserved.

The program is oriented towards how we serve our internal customer services, and we take it very seriously.  Among many other things to institutionalize customer service, we have new hire indoctrination training, refresher training, and customer satisfaction surveys that managers live and die by.  Literally, if you're a manager and you don't take customer service seriously at my organization, you'll be here one day and suddenly disappear the next.  The end result is a management team and staff that truly are passionate about customer service.  That's why, as a small not-for-profit organization, we routinely win awards like ComputerWorld's 100 Best Places to Work--beating out multi-billion dollar companies.  But, while we're excellent at "transactional" customer service, we recognized that we weren't necessarily solution providers.

That recognition resulted in a search for something better that ended up with an emerging concept called "trusted business advisor."  As we've been studying the concept, we ultimately decided that the "trusted" part is a red herring.  It sounds cooler than just "business advisor," but "trust" is partly emotion and therefore the definition of trust varies from person to person.  Also, if our customer isn't doing the "right" thing, they shouldn't have an expectation of trust that we won't escalate--meaning, our relationship will never be to the point that we'll sweep something under the carpet on behalf of our customers.  Consequently, we've thrown out the word "trusted"--but we'll still strive to create that trusting relationship.  It's just that whenever we talked about the concept of "trusted business advisor," everyone got hung up on, and confused by, the "trusted" part.  So, we're focusing on re-tooling our organization's staff--including the Vendor Management Office--on becoming "business advisors."

Here's our definition of "business advisor":

As we strive to become Business Advisors, our objective is to provide exceptional value to our ultimate customers by demonstrating the skills, expertise, and character necessary to help our internal customers achieve their goals, solve problems, and improve their operations. In doing so, we will strive to earn the trust of our internal customers while ensuring that our ultimate customers' interests are served as a first priority.

So what's the difference between my organizations "Listen, Understand, Communicate, and Then Deliver" customer service program and becoming a "business advisor?"  Think quantitative and qualitative.  For example, the former is "Negotiating contracts within 30-days of the customer's request" and the latter is "Mitigating risk by ensuring that contract terms and conditions are in alignment with the requirements of the customer and the organization."  Contract turn-around performance is an important element of basic customer service.  Working with a customer to identify risk areas and finding ways to mitigate that risk contractually is a higher-level of customer service.

As you might guess, the crux of becoming a business advisor is identifying the gaps of employees to map what they need to focus on.  Because business advisor is an emerging concept, there's mostly a lot of hype and gibberish out there on the subject without much substance.  Really nothing meaty to help identify gaps--until just recently...  BossaNova, a consulting firm located in Washington, DC that helps companies train their employees to become internal consults, developed a succinct and comprehensive list of "rules" that is superb for identifying gaps.  These "rules," which are basically a self-assessment, dove-tail perfectly to the business advisor concept.  I encourage you to share the rules with your procurement staff, and ask them to complete the self-assessment.  Even if your company doesn't have a formal customer service program--and doesn't plan on having one anytime soon--get a jump-start on improving your own department's customer service by using the self-assessment as a tool to create a professional development plan for your staff.  I can't say enough good things about this "short and sweet" self-assessment, which you can find by clicking here.