In June I asked my team to record, for one quarter, every piece of work done for a named customer rather than for the company in general. What came back was about two and a half people's worth of time spread across twenty three customers, and most of it was bespoke.
There were weekly reports in a customer's own layout, rebuilt from our standard data because their head of logistics wanted the columns in a different order. There was a label with an extra barcode for one retailer, maintained through every label change since 2021. There were monthly extracts, delivery rules coded into the dispatch system for a single account, and a steady flow of questions from account managers who knew that a message to somebody in IT would be answered the same day.
None of it appeared in any contract. Account managers had offered it in good faith during renewals and escalations, because to them it cost nothing. It came out of my budget, which is spread across the business as overhead, so every customer's profitability report showed the same share of IT regardless of what we did for them. Once their bespoke work was counted, two of our smaller accounts were costing us money to serve. One of them was the customer we most often described as low maintenance.
I do not want to stop doing things for customers. Several of those extras are the reason a customer stays with us. The difficulty was that they were commercial decisions being made by people who could not see their price.
We now publish a short catalogue of standard reporting and integration, which covers most requests. Anything outside it gets a rough estimate from my team before it is offered, and the account manager decides whether to charge, absorb or decline it with that number in front of them. Customer specific work now appears in that account's profitability report. And every renewal pack includes a list of what we do for that customer beyond the standard, so the negotiation starts from the whole picture.
Both loss making accounts have since been repriced at renewal, and one of them now pays for its label.
A favour looks free to the person offering it. My team had been paying for these, in the internal work that waited in the queue while we did them.
– Serguey Shinder
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