I frequently find myself wondering why my new Indianapolis small business computer consulting customers have such a hard time trusting us when we make recommendations. My long time computer outsourcing customers tend to go with our ideas without much discussion. That, of course, is the difference. Trust takes time to build. With new customers, we're still an unknown commodity. Sure, they chose us over their other options for IT outsourcing, but they still want to keep a close eye on us. Why? Because so many people do such a poor job at what they are supposed to do for us.
I recently hired a janitorial service. I made a checklist of the things that needed to be done each day, week, month, and quarter. I gave the prospective companies this list and asked them to give me a price for completing them according to schedule. We picked a company and they started cleaning our offices. Right away things didn't look good. They skipped items on the list. They didn't complete some of the tasks. We talked to them and pointed out the errors and ommissions. They were apologetic and repentent; promising to do better.
As time went on, things didn't get better. We continued to complain. They became defensive. Finally, we stopped complaining. We started looking for another provider. We didn't do this because we didn't like these guys. I actually hoped we could help them grow their small business by making referrals for them. We stop using these guys because we reached a point where we knew we could not trust them to get the job done right. If I have to spend my time wondering whether my janitors are putting in a good effort, I've got the wrong janitors.
The lesson I took away from that is that trust must be earned, and it must be earned every day. None of us will do our jobs perfectly. Few people expect that of their providers, especially their computer network consulting providers. We should expect that our providers will put in their very best effort, and will step up when something goes wrong. That's what Port-to-Port Consulting does when our Pertingo computer support customers call with a problem.
I recently hired a janitorial service. I made a checklist of the things that needed to be done each day, week, month, and quarter. I gave the prospective companies this list and asked them to give me a price for completing them according to schedule. We picked a company and they started cleaning our offices. Right away things didn't look good. They skipped items on the list. They didn't complete some of the tasks. We talked to them and pointed out the errors and ommissions. They were apologetic and repentent; promising to do better.
As time went on, things didn't get better. We continued to complain. They became defensive. Finally, we stopped complaining. We started looking for another provider. We didn't do this because we didn't like these guys. I actually hoped we could help them grow their small business by making referrals for them. We stop using these guys because we reached a point where we knew we could not trust them to get the job done right. If I have to spend my time wondering whether my janitors are putting in a good effort, I've got the wrong janitors.
The lesson I took away from that is that trust must be earned, and it must be earned every day. None of us will do our jobs perfectly. Few people expect that of their providers, especially their computer network consulting providers. We should expect that our providers will put in their very best effort, and will step up when something goes wrong. That's what Port-to-Port Consulting does when our Pertingo computer support customers call with a problem.
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