Let us accept that any good transaction needs a proper Give & Take. If there is nobody to take, you can’t give. The same philosophy applies in business as well. I firmly believe that nobody should invoice their customers without contributing value to their business lifecycle. Vendors/Partners give service and customers take it. How can one ensure that this transaction is fair? Well, by being expert in relative domain/skills/technology. Indeed, there are other parameters to make it successful and fair. However, if you don’t even have expertise/knowledge of that skills/domain, it becomes a time consuming activity. Moreover, it also may be considered as cheating to an extent since you learn that expertise/skills at the expense of customers while you are expected to provide services for that cost.
We tend to achieve a fair transaction by keeping our model simple. We understand the customer requirements and THEN get an expert who will be able to do value addition and yet get his career aligned by working on that project/assignment. Yes, we don’t keep anybody on bench and are candid with our customers on the timelines that we take to get the appropriate expert on board. The customer too understands the market and knows that the wait is worth it.
We start our relationship with our employees and customers with trust and confidence. We do not take either of them for granted. We respect their individuality, skills and thought process and give them enough freedom. Rome was not built in a day. We understand the process and constantly keep evaluating it periodically. We are in a process of creating world class technical leaders and consultants. When you are in the field, you have only two choices – Beat or get beaten. What I mean is that either you win or lose the project or succumb to customer antics or politics. The choice is yours. Indeed ethics and attitude come into picture that decide how you manage the situation without getting diluted.
At eStomi, the vision and mission is imbibed in all team members – To be the most sought ITSM/BSM partner/vendor for our customers. Every single employee demonstrates that they are brand ambassadors of eStomi. We do not undertake assignments of small durations. Our consultancy period, especially for Remedy is for a year or 18 months at the least. We provide technical thought leadership that helps to achieve business goals. We try to help the customer by providing services remotely, especially for OTRS consultancy, wherever possible. This helps to save the cost of our customers. Since we are clear in terms of what we are getting paid, we do not hesitate the let the customer know which is in and out of scope. We do not hesitate to ask for payments if we have really added the value. There has been an instance where in we couldn’t complete about 5% of activities due to limitations/dependency of Operating System. We never asked our customer to pay for that as there was no way to provide a solution in that case. At the same time, there has been an instance where in we decided to cut off the relationship with a large customer since the customer didn’t seem interested to oblige the payment for several months despite giving them plethora of services (worth several lacs) free of cost hoping for a long term relationship. You see, it was only a “Take” transaction and never mutually beneficial.
On the other hand, we have a set of customers where in there is a mutual admiration and we work hand in hand so much so that they do not talk to their customers without involving us being in meetings. We have been able to demonstrate our capabilities by completing their major milestones in a month or two that were pending for over year and a half, so much so that they refer us to their other groups for implementing critical projects. We even provide consultancy to organizations who have ITSM products; but not enough expertise to convince their customers on ITSM solutions. Why? Simply put, its not only that we are skilled experts and professionals, we really DO contribute to our customers’ business lifecycles.
