Tom Preece Testimonial - CEO of CPM
My name's Tom Preece and I'm the Managing Director of CPM International. The reason why we decided to audit the client relationships was firstly -I guess - for reassurance to make sure we were being told by the local management basically the truth and that the state of the relationship was as they said. I guess the second one was to try and anticipate and see if there were any particular issues at the time and whilst the audit is a point in time, we have a couple of instances whereby we've gone in, in the audit and we've found one or two problems that the local management were not aware of, we've resolved those issues obviously and that resulted in positive momentum rather than negative momentum in that client relationship, so we found it to be particularly valuable from that point of view.
Why use RAM rather than do it in-house?
We felt as though we needed the discipline of a third party to make sure we did it properly, thoroughly, on time etc. We liked the methodology of RAM, we also like the analysis that they came up with in terms of the boxes and the pictures they make it very visual and easy for people to understand in terms of the success or otherwise of that particular audit. So it was a combination of things but we don't regret it at all, in terms of it giving us the discipline and the programme has been going for about 5 or 6 years now and I can guarantee that wouldn't have happened had we done it internally.
How did your clients feel about the process?
The clients love it, first of all they appreciate the effort that you go to and that you actually care about what they think, whereas some agencies I guess or some businesses sometimes you wonder if they actually care at all in terms of the service that they give. The mere act of someone going along and in some cases taking a plane journey specifically to see the client themselves, that mere act is enough I think to show the client we care about what they think.
How did your colleagues react?
We're a global business now and you would expect some cultural differences in terms of the acceptability of the programme and with virtually everything we do there's normally some dissension, for some reason this is one of the very few things that people just see the sense of it, it's common sense that you should check on what people think and because of the results and because of the actions from those results I've had very very little resistance in terms of adopting the programme throughout the world.
What have the benefits been?
One of the side benefits of the relationship audits process is in terms of business development now I know it's not supposed to be a business development tool and it is definitely there to see the current state of the relationship and assess commitment but nevertheless we have some significant examples where we've gone along and we've uncovered opportunities that would not necessarily have been uncovered in the in normal course of events. And in terms of that one fact in itself justified payback for the whole programme and I guess a slightly unexpected outcome of the audits was we get into conversations about the future and how the client is developing their business and therefore that gives us a few clues as to how we should develop our business to meet the client needs.
What has been the return on the investment?
We're fairly disciplined with our clients in terms of justifying the ROI of the work we do for them and I guess the easiest way to answer that question is to say we've never formally done it because no-one's ever felt the need to it's so obvious that we get ROI of many times over the business development point being one of them. Another example I would give is that we were in trouble with one particular client in the UK and we didn't necessarily know the extent of that trouble, what happened is the audit happed and we turned the client around and that is now for us one of our top 3 clients so that one audit and that one interview justifies the whole programme probably for 5 to 10 years. In terms of RAM and our relationship with RAM over the last 5 years I would probably count that as one of the most significant events whilst I've been Group CEO for seven years its probably one of the best things I've done as Group CEO.
Would you recommend RAM?
I would recommend Relationship Audits, it's obviously a key question and the actual questionnaire we use and that dictates commitment, I guess I am completely committed to the programme. As I said I think it's one of the best things we've ever done and I would recommend it to any business who cares about their clients.