Retail services

The customer who quietly stops

An account customer who orders every six weeks is worth a great deal over a year, and when they stop, nothing happens. There is no cancellation, no complaint and no moment. The order simply does not arrive, and because it was never expected on a particular date, no one notices.

Most businesses find out at the quarter, when the numbers are down and it is too late to be a telephone call and has become a difficult conversation. By then they have usually started buying from somebody else and have got used to it.

A reorder date as a task against the customer turns a silence into an event. It is not clever software. It is the difference between ringing somebody in week seven to ask whether everything is alright, and finding out in month four.

The account is a company and you know one person in it

A business buying from you on account has a buyer who orders, someone who approves, and often a site person who actually receives the goods and knows when something was wrong. Most suppliers record one of them.

That matters at exactly two moments, and both are expensive. When your contact leaves, the relationship goes with them and the account is up for review by somebody who has never heard of you. And when you send anything to the customer base, two thirds of the people who influence the buying decision never see it.

An organisation with people connected to it under roles fixes both. Each has their own history and their own consent, so the buyer gets the price list and the site contact gets the delivery notice, and neither gets the other.

The knowledge is in the rep

In most businesses of this kind, what a customer buys, what they are fussy about, what went wrong in 2023 and what was agreed about it lives entirely with the person who serves them. When that person is off, or leaves, the business is materially worse at serving that customer and everyone can tell.

A timeline on the record, written as things happen rather than by somebody remembering to log them, is what moves that knowledge from a person to the business. It is also the thing that makes a handover survivable rather than a slow decline no one attributes to the handover.

Not a till, a shop or a stock system

No point of sale. No stock levels, reorder points or valuation. No online shop, basket or checkout. No barcode scanning. No integration with a retail platform today.

The catalogue that exists on the higher plans is a price list used to build quotations. It is not inventory, and treating it as inventory would be a mistake that shows up at the worst time.

Not loyalty

No points, no balances, no vouchers, no scheme mechanics. If loyalty is the engine of your business, buy something built for it.

What we would build if this trade asked

Reading from a trade or accounting system so the order history and the account balance appear against the relationship without being typed twice. The connector framework exists and this trade is not on it, which the roadmap says by name instead of describing it as coming soon.

The invented business is a wholesaler of cleaning and hygiene supplies with a trade counter, selling to offices, care homes and contract cleaners. The invented customer is a contract cleaning firm with a handful of vans. What follows is what would be recorded at each step, and what it costs when it is not.

Week one, the account is opened at the counter

Someone comes in, buys for cash twice, and on the third visit asks about an account. A credit application is filled in and the account goes live in the accounting package with a number and thirty day terms. Whoever opens it will usually look the firm up at Companies House first, and the registered name found there is the one worth typing in, because a trading name and a registered name diverge often enough to produce two records for one customer.

What gets recorded here is an organisation with the relationship type of account customer, the account number in a custom field, the agreed terms in another, and the person who came in connected to the organisation with the role of the one who orders. Three minutes. The alternative, which is what usually happens, is that the account exists only in the ledger and the person exists only in the memory of whoever was on the counter that day.

Weeks two to twenty, a pattern establishes itself and nobody names it

Orders come in by telephone roughly every six weeks: consumables that run out on a cycle set by how many contracts they are cleaning. The counter knows this in the way people know things about customers they like, which is to say they would recognise it if asked and never think about it otherwise.

What gets recorded is a task against the customer for the expected reorder, and a timeline that fills up on its own with what happened. The cost of not recording it is, at this point, nothing at all. That is what makes this the step everybody skips, and it is why the expensive step later is expensive.

Week twenty two, half an order arrives and someone is annoyed

A delivery goes out short. The customer rings, is cross, and is dealt with by whoever picked up, who arranges a credit and sends the missing goods the following day. Handled well, and the customer says so.

What gets recorded is a matter against the record with a target in working hours, closed the same week, and a note of what was agreed. The cost of not recording it surfaces the next time the same thing happens, when a different person answers, has no idea it has happened before, treats it as a first occurrence, and the customer has to explain their own history to their supplier. That conversation is the one where a good customer starts thinking about alternatives.

Week thirty, the person who orders leaves

The contract cleaner takes on an operations manager who is now responsible for buying. The person you knew has gone somewhere else in the same trade.

What gets recorded is the end of one connection with a date and the start of another, so the account keeps the history of who was there and when. The person who left stays on the system as a person, so the next time their new employer appears in an enquiry somebody recognises the name. The cost of not recording it is the most common expensive event in this trade: an account whose entire relationship value sat with one person, now being reviewed by a stranger holding three quotations and no reason to prefer you.

Week thirty seven, the order does not come

Six weeks pass and nothing arrives. No one at the wholesaler notices, because nothing happening is not an event. The new operations manager has had a call from a national supplier and is trying them for a month to see.

What happens with a reorder task is that a date passes with no order against it, and somebody rings the following week to ask whether everything is alright. The timeline makes that call useful rather than awkward: you know what they usually take and roughly when, so you are a supplier paying attention instead of a supplier chasing. In this invented case the answer is that the last delivery was late, and the new manager did not know that was unusual. That is a fixable thing, and it is only fixable while somebody is talking.

The same story with nothing written down

The silence is not noticed. At the quarter someone looks at the figures, sees the account is down and rings. By then the customer has had four months of an adequate alternative, has renegotiated nothing and has no complaint to make, so the call has no subject. There is nothing to fix because nothing is broken. They simply buy elsewhere now, and the reason they started doing so has been forgotten by everyone involved.

Nothing in the version that works is clever. It is a date, two roles, a matter and a note, entered by people who were already having those conversations. The whole difference is that absence became visible, and absence is the one thing in this trade that no process ever surfaces on its own.

The person who queries the invoice never orders anything

Accounts payable at your customer exists to check, question and pay. They will contact you about a price that does not match the delivery note, about a credit that has not appeared, and about nothing else, ever. They are frequently the contact name that came across from your own ledger, which is how a business ends up with the one person at the account who does not buy anything recorded as the customer.

Hold them as a person connected to the organisation with their own role and their own consent, which for this person is almost always no marketing at all. The gain is two sided: the invoice query reaches somebody who knows what it concerns, and your price list stops arriving with somebody who never asked for it and finds it irritating.

Goods in knows what actually arrived, and nobody asks them

At a customer of any size the person who receives the delivery is not the person who ordered it. They sign for it, they see the state it arrives in, and they are the only person with first hand knowledge of the thing that later becomes a complaint. Yet the conversation about that complaint happens between your office and the buyer, both of whom are repeating what someone else told them.

A connection with the role of receiving goods, held against the delivery site rather than the head office where those differ, turns that into a name and a telephone number on the record. It also gives you somebody to ring when a delivery is going to be late, which is the cheapest way there is of stopping a lateness becoming a matter.

The buying group negotiated terms you were not in the room for

A great many independent businesses buy through a group: terms and a rebate agreed centrally, orders placed locally, and a conference each year where the members and their suppliers all appear. Your customer is a member. The commercial agreement that governs what you charge them was made with someone else entirely, and it changes on a cycle you do not control and are not told about early.

The practical modelling is a custom field on the account naming the group, so that when the terms change the list of affected customers is a saved view rather than an afternoon of trying to remember. It is a small field with a large payoff, because group terms change for everybody at once, and the businesses caught out are the ones that have to work out who is in it while the change is already live.

The manufacturer's area rep, who sends you work and expects to hear back

In a good deal of this trade the demand is created by someone who sells you nothing. A manufacturer's representative specifies their product to a contractor or an end user and then tells them which stockist to ring. That enquiry arrives at your counter looking like any other enquiry, and the person who caused it is invisible in your records.

Two consequences follow. You cannot tell which of those people is worth cultivating, because you have no way of counting what each of them sent you. And you do not tell them the outcome, which is the one thing that makes someone send you the next one. Hold them as their own relationship type, connected to the supplier they work for, and record which of them an enquiry came from. That is a field and a habit, and it is the difference between a source of work and a pleasant person who occasionally visits.

The carrier, whose mistakes arrive as your complaint

Pallets go out on someone else's network, and a proportion of them arrive late, damaged or at the wrong entrance. Your customer has no relationship with the carrier and would not want one if it were offered. They have a relationship with you, and as far as they are concerned the failure is yours.

The matter belongs on your customer's record, because that is where somebody will look for it next time they speak to them, with a note of which carrier and which consignment. Held that way a pattern becomes visible: the same route, the same depot, or the same customer whose access is genuinely difficult and who has quietly been written up as awkward when in truth their yard is hard to get a wagon into. Both of those are conversations worth having, and neither is possible unless the individual annoyances were written somewhere they accumulate.

A rule for deciding which of them gets a record

A party is worth holding when somebody in your business would otherwise have to ask a colleague who they were. That test excludes most people and includes the five above in almost every business of this kind, which is about the right answer. Holding everyone produces a database that decays until nobody trusts it. Holding no one but the buyer produces a business whose knowledge walks out of the door with one person, which is where most of this trade currently stands.