Relationship Audits & Management (RAM) helps companies optimise their commercial relationships.
Established in London in 2000 and now with offices in Greenwich, Connecticut, USA and Melbourne, Australia, RAM is continuing to expand its global capability.
RAM is led by experienced consultants, each of whom has worked at senior levels in a service environment and is skilled in delivering practical programmes which build on strengths, resolve issues and generate value and rapport. Added together, our experience in relationship management can be counted in the hundreds of years.
RAM works with those companies who provide services to other companies (service providers) and those who buy services (service buyers) from outside suppliers or other departments.
- It helps service providers better understand, secure and deepen their client relationships to extend and increase revenue and profit.
- It helps service buyers better evaluate relationships with their service providers and suppliers to generate higher productivity, greater process efficiency and better value for money.
We're proud to enjoy high levels of repeat purchase and long tenure from our clients. This is reflected by the number of them who have gone on record to confirm the consistent positive commercial impact that working with RAM has brought to their businesses.
How RAM Works
RAM works with its clients to tailor its solutions to individual circumstances - we don't believe in a 'one size fits all' approach to relationship assessments.
So, while we offer a range of innovative 'off the shelf' services and solutions that can be applied to a variety of relationship scenarios, we can also customise our offer to deal with the huge variety of situations that characterise high value commercial relationships.
RAM typically works with its clients in three ways:
- Undertaking relationship evaluations as an independent third party and providing actionable intelligence to guide intelligent action.
- Developing and customising web-based evaluation and reporting systems and licensing them for companies to use at will in managing their own key stakeholder relationships.
- Providing skills transfer programmes to improve the competency of those people for whom relationship evaluation and management is a core part of their role and responsibility.
Standard RAM evaluation methodologies vary from in-depth evaluations (carried out face-to-face or by phone) to shorter web-based assessments where the number of participants involved, geographical constraints, or the need for feedback frequency demands a different approach.
Why Work With RAM?
'Why work with RAM?' is a question best asked of our clients. The short answer, of course, is to secure commercial gain. To that end, our clients have gone on record to testify that their investment in RAM has paid back, many times over, whether they are service providers or service buyers.
RAM are specialists in the relationship enhancement space - it's all we do, and we continually invest time and resources to ensure that we are able to provide our clients with the kind of reporting tools and actionable intelligence that they need, to ensure that the potential of their strategic stakeholder relationships is maximised.
Specifically, for Service Providers RAM can:
- Help them understand the true state of client or stakeholder relationships - in particular, the level of relative client commitment.
- Help prevent client defections, and extend the lifetime value of existing relationships.
- Help a service provider understand why a major tender or pitch was lost.
- Provide an organisation that is acquiring another with a true picture of the latter's client relationships.
- License its IP, and train nominated individuals to undertake evaluations for organisations that have a very large number of clients.
- Provide consultative help on how to act upon the intelligence gathered.
For Service Buyers RAM's tools, systems and input will help them extract more
out of those relationships - improving working practices, productivity and, ultimately, value for money.
Specifically, RAM can:
- Create and customise multi-functional and proven web-enabled evaluation systems, which provide real-time information on the state of supplier relationships to allow more effective management.
- Provide systems that allow data 'slicing and dicing' according to chosen parameters such as geography, supplier type/size, brands, etc.
- Allow existing evaluation systems to be migrated to new contemporary platforms without loss of data.
- Develop 360° evaluation systems that identify where adjustments are necessary by the buying entity, to ensure better supplier management and delivery.
- Link evaluation systems with remuneration and supplier payment systems.
For both service providers and buyers, investing in relationships rather than taking them for granted is increasingly seen as a discriminator in the challenge to generate competitive advantage at the margin.