Communication is King

I’m a Blackberry user and I spend a lot of time out of the office, probably as much as I spend in the office.  So when the servers went down and we couldn’t get email or a number of other services it was a bit of a drama.  Ultimately as a business person I adapted and I found my way through the problem and nobody noticed that I was unreachable because I found other ways to get what I needed.  I can understand for others this wasn’t as easy.  The biggest thing that I noticed about the issue was the lack of information and clarity that could inform the customer.  When you have a crisis of that magnitude creating worldwide problems I can imagine it’s quite traumatic but with the levels of staffing available surely one of the first things to do was to get communication out there.  The more I think about the problems I see whether it’s with big business or with companies like Zipporah it’s communication that is key to managing all of these things.

Over the length of my career with Zipporah from the day it started until today (and probably until the day I finally give in to the ravages of old age, stress and a poor diet) there are always moments where we as the supplier and our clients may not see things the same way or a problem arises which unless caught early can become an issue and eventually a showstopper.   I’ve seen many of these everywhere I have worked even before we started with Zipporah but there has always been a very easy way to resolve the issue – a conversation.  This may be about understanding why the issues is there, understanding how the system overcomes the issue in a way the client didn’t realise, it could even be about finding a middle ground between what the off the shelf package is and what an individual requirement for a particular department is but ultimately it can all be resolved with decent communication.  Very little will move forward until both parties talk and too many problems arise based on assumption.

Sometimes it can just be a simple matter of keeping clients informed.  We, this week, have had some troubles with our servers and as a number of clients utilise our service we tried to ensure communication flowed constantly to provide relevant updates.  We thought this was important to ensure our clients didn’t feel that we weren’t making every effort to resolve the problem.  At the other end of the scale we have had several successes of late with the new processes we have put in place to fully specify all systems that we implement for clients recognising configuration and change up front to avoid confusion.  This has worked brilliantly with implementation times falling and entirely new systems going through UAT in very short timescales.  The upshot is that for many of our existing clients we will be bringing in a bit more paperwork for you I’m afraid, resulting in the need for you to agree and signoff things a lot more but this up front slightly longer process is proving to reduce time considerably at delivery and testing stage, which must be worth the effort.  So it’s not that now we are bigger we have decided to become less flexible it’s that now we are bigger we have become better at being more flexible, more responsive and ensuring you have absolute clarity on what you need us to deliver.