Customers don' t care; you' d better

"Our problems are not news, and our customers don' t care about them."

By -- Modern Materials Handling, 4/1/2000

The New Economy is already passe. To be truly plugged in to the latest jargon, you need to start talking about the Now Economy.

This new term, bandied about for almost a year in the e-business world, may be little more than a passing fad favored by those bent on using only the most enlightened "biz-speak." Nonetheless, it does describe the mood of today' s customer. Whether a consumer shopping on-line from home, or the manager of procurement for a Fortune 1000 firm, everyone seems to want the same thing these days: speed.

Customers at every point on the Now Economy' s buying spectrum have simple wants. They want a fair, competitive price. They want the highest possible quality. And they want it NOW!

For vendors, those simple wants are hardly simple to satisfy. To meet growing demands for speed, efficiency, and accuracy, the systems which run America' s businesses are becoming more complex by the day. Technology now moves information in parallel to goods and materials. High-end computer systems seek (sometimes with only limited success) to connect a business' entire enterprise with a single system of supply chain technology.

As the complexities of these systems grow, so too does the work associated with specifying the systems' objectives. Simply doing the necessary legwork to research and build a response to a bid-request for a major materials handling and logistics system, for instance, can take a vendor' s best team weeks, even months, to complete.

This is a source of growing consternation for many. The president of one of the country' s largest systems integrators recently commented that customers in the future are going to have to take into consideration the costs associated with simply building a response to an RFQ (request for quote.)

It' s certainly not an original notion. It is also, in many ways, a logical extension of the growing spirit of buyer-vendor partnerships that is having a clearly positive impact on many business operations today. Still, trying to extend that partnership concept to include vendors that are only at the stage of bidding for a buyer' s business is hard to visualize.

Even as we strive to build deeper and stronger partnerships, there are axioms that still hold true. One is well described by an experience I had several years ago while working as the managing editor of a newspaper in the Boston area.

Back when word processors were still a combination of a typewriter and a pen, newspaper copy was set into type by operators of large typesetting machines. On one occasion, the system crashed and delayed shipping of a Thursday edition. Rather that arriving at stores at 5:30 am, the paper wouldn' t arrive until 10 or 11.

I suggested to the editor that we run a small box on Page 1 explaining the problem we had and apologizing for the late delivery. He wouldn' t hear of it.

"Our readers only care about one thing, Mac Donald," he said in his best, stereotypical, grumpy, old newspaper editor voice. "All that matters to them is that when they put a quarter on the counter, they get their paper. Our problems are not news, and our customers don' t care about them."

Although said in a different industry, long ago, those words still ring true, and they represent a philosophy that many of us would be well-served to recognize.