The second story concerns a programme to put in a customer management system. This ambitious programme is designed to equip all of our customer service and sales people with databases so that they can track all of the transactions and interactions that we have had with a customer.
For an organisation that deals with pretty much every business in the UK, as you might imagine this is a complex and large task, and as you might also imagine, we haven't the skills and the resources in-house to undertake it. So we have had to work with partners.
Then we found the partnership wasn't working. Trust started to break down. As we thought our suppliers were trying to put one over on us, we started to become more defensive. As they thought we were trying to put one over on them, they started to become very secretive and look for ways out of the agreement.
The result was that both sides started to think about how they were going to extricate themselves from this mess. Instead of working together to get the job done, we were working against each other to try to minimise exposure.
In the end we sat down together. We took some time out to review what was going on and what each party wanted from the relationship. We came back together, redefined a very tight process, put in place key performance indicators, measured them regularly, and made sure that we communicated openly. We also defined the scope of the partnership so that we knew where the boundaries were - and it began to work.
The lessons are so basic but time after time companies like ours still get them wrong.
Copyright Partnership Sourcing Ltd 2001. All rights reserved.