Raising the bar

As part of my regular job, I keep interacting with our clients. I have been fortunate enough to work closely with some people from the client organization and learn how they think an IT service provider should work. In the engagement that we are in, we have pretty established processes for most of the things and the delivery record has by far been quite impressive. However, the manager from the clients’ side feels that apart from consistent delivery, the vendor should also do something more. So, the other day, I asked what more can we do to keep them happy. He asked me what kind of investment you are making in the engagement. This set me thinking. We have in fact not done any worthwhile investment apart from seeing to it that the engagement runs smoothly. He was in a way correct. There can be various kinds of investments to get a better ROI from the engagement. For example, we could provide them a consultant from say our Delivery Quality Assurance wing, who can study our processes and propose improvement. The consultant can even study their processes and give recommendations. 

It is the value we bring to the table which matters. When the client was not happy with their earlier vendor, they came to us and we have proved them our mettle with our fine delivery mechanism and technical thoroughness. After 2 years into the engagement, the client has now got used to the fact that deliveries will be smooth. So now the bar has to be raised.