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Where Good Business Begins

Criticism – even constructive criticism – is a tricky thing. It’s rare to meet an individual who can truly react to constructive criticism with grace, and even rarer to encounter an individual who proactively seeks it out in order to improve him/herself.

But just last week in Saint Louis, while attending a conference hosted by a partner in the commercial trucking industry, I met a woman with a remarkable job focused on doing just that. As “Customer Advocate,” she establishes relationships with customers in order to solicit their criticisms, and then campaigns within her organization to realize improvements that will positively impact the customers she serves.

The story of her newly-created role had my wheels turning…I started on the four-hour drive home to Kansas City, mulling over the concept of customer-centricity.

By the time I pulled into my driveway, I realized that the driving force behind every one of our client’s private label billing and payment programs is the desire to be more customer-centric. Like a Customer Advocate, these programs also yield improvements that positively impact end-users – albeit improvements related to the way in which these end-users purchase and pay for the products and services they require to do business.

For some, it’s as simple as consolidating a customer’s charges on a single billing statement in order that the customer isn’t burdened with cutting separate checks for individual purchases.

For others, the focus is providing customers with an electronic payment form they can issue to their employees--an electronic payment form that carries less risk of fraud and misuse than a general use credit card.

For others still, it’s about piping line-item purchasing data to customers in formats they can upload into their expense management systems without requiring their IT resources to manipulate it.

Some clients use us to capture customer-specific information at the point-of-purchase – information we include on billing statements such as cost centers and purchase order numbers – knowing this supplemental data makes customers’ AP processes more efficient.

The customer-centric features offered from program to program that we operate vary significantly, but they all initiated from the same place – a customer advocate (whether in title or not) listening to the customers’ needs and campaigning for a solution.