Should all customers be treated as equal?

I’m grateful to the film Made in Dagenham for the inspiration for this blog. For those who haven’t seen it, the film is the true story of 187 women machinists who worked for Ford in Dagenham. While their job was an extremely skilled one, they were paid far less than the equivalent male workers. To achieve equal status they went on strike, halting production at Ford UK and eventually leading to the creation of the Equal Opportunity Act.

This has led me to once again raise the question that should all “customers” be treated equally the same. Much will depend on how you define a “customer”, is a “customer” someone who places your biggest order? Or is a company that places regular orders? Or is it the one who pays?

The current economic climate means that companies are looking at the ledgers and realising that their profit is often in unpaid invoices. As a debt collector, I receive instructions from clients to collect their overdue invoices, these clients include professionals such as solicitors, accountants, doctors, insurance agents and loss assessors. Other clients include social housing and private landlords, importers, exporters etc and regardless of their industry sector or turnover they all have problems with non-paying “customers”.

The most interesting fact is that a “professional” such as an accountant will have a far less realistic view about credit control, than say an IT consultant who depends on the accountant for advise as how to improve their profitability. As an example, earlier this year we were instructed by a fairly well known firm of accounts to “sort out their bad debts”. That problem was they were owed approximately £1m and the partners were getting a bit concerned as their overdraft was now £500,000 and their bank had wanted to know when they would start to reduce it.

After I looked at the ledger I asked the partners about a random number of invoices and why they hadn’t chased them, seeing that some were over 48 months overdue. The answer while not surprising did depress me, they said the reason that they hadn’t chased them was “That they were old clients and had always paid their debts late”. I then asked them if they would mind me speaking to a couple of their “clients” while I was in their office, they agreed as long as I promised not to be too aggressive!

Amazingly the first company I tried to call the phone was dead, however with a little bit of investigation I found they had moved 9 months previously! More importantly they claimed that they had written to the practice 18 months earlier stating that they no longer wanted them to act on their behalf and that they had included a cheque, which had not been banked. They explained that one of the reasons for their decision to look for another accountant was the lack of communication and agreed to make an immediate BACS payment.

Another was so unhappy with the lack of service they had received they refused to pay settle the invoice, I only had to make one more phone call for the penny to drop and they began to realise that we were not dealing with “clients” but DEBTORS and agreed to allow my very experienced team of collectors to do what they did best. The upshot was that the team collected or resolved nearly 75% of the invoices within 8 weeks. At our follow up meeting a couple of months later I was told by the partners that our actions had made them realise that only those that settled their invoices within an agreed period, in their case 12 weeks were worthy of being called a Client.

If you would like to find out more about David Baum and Deanem Collections please do not hesitate to contact them either by telephone +44 (0)208 446 7720 or email them at enquiries@deanemcollections.co.uk or visit the website www.deanemcollections.co.uk.