Since I’ve written quite a bit about habits that don’t endear a vendor to a company, I thought I’d take a spin into the world of actual best practices. After all, if I wanted to do nothing but complain there’s always Yelp and Google reviews.
One of the high-level categorizations I use for a vendor partner is pretty simple:
Staying with this company is a no-brainer.*
They’re okay, but I’m open to a better deal from other providers.
The only thing keeping me with these schmucks is a contract and the fact that fixing what they’ve screwed up most recently has me too exhausted to search for a replacement.
At the beginning of 2020 my organization began a relationship with Animalytix.** They provide two key services for us: first, they collect critical data on our behalf from key customers and assemble it into a common model, usable dataset. Second, and even more important, they perform a cleanup operation that has a massive impact on the usability.
If we were to do that work in-house, we’d have to dedicate a full time task to just those two things, and possibly more time than that. However, outsourcing the work only truly saves us time if the work is done well. When the quality is low, it costs us far more than just the outsourcing fee. Time is money here, and bad work is more expensive to us than no work.
Fortunately, Animalytix is fantastic. They’re solidly in that “staying with them is a no-brainer” category. I could make a very long list of their strengths, but here are the key behaviors and characteristics that keep them there:
During the negotiation and sale phases, they’re very clear and concise about what they do and what they don’t do.
Once things get underway, they fulfill the core agreement reliability, accurately, and on-time.***
They respond very, very quickly to all inquiries. Even when my main point of contact has to seek information from another resource, the response is quick enough that you’d hardly realize more than one person was involved.
After our day to day operation had settled in smoothly, they began reaching out proactively, seeking to understand our business more so they can see if there are opportunities for improvement to consider.
And they keep me informed. If there’s something that might be an issue or of interest to me, I hear from the Animalytix team. They err on the side of communication: if an out of the ordinary event is coming up and it could cause a problem, they fill me in so I can be prepared.
It’s a pretty simple formula — have a clear offering, fulfill it as promised, react appropriately, be proactive when you can, and stay in touch. It’s definitely not rocket science, but perhaps it is a magic formula, and in my experience, it’s good to be the guy with the magic.
* Savvy account managers will realize this is the best category to be in.
** I think we can say confidently it’s the start of a beautiful relationship, I’m just not sure who’s Bogie and who’s Claude Rains.
*** Think that’s obvious? Think again. People frequently believe that they can do a poor job at the core if they just offer a little extra now and then. I was taught as far back as fourth grade that you can’t get extra credit if you don’t turn in the base work.