CustomerVisits

Customer Visits Strategy. (Norman Taylor)

“Customer visiting has been argued as possibly one of the main functions of the credit department. Since the customer is usually the best source of information about itself, the importance of customer visits is obvious.

COMMON NEGATIVES AGAINST VISITING CUSTOMERS

	High travel expenses.
	Too much lost time from the office.
	Too confrontational.
	Leads to too much familiarity with the customer.
	Belief that Credit and Sales work at cross purposes and therefore should not make a joint visit.

OBJECTIVES OF CUSTOMER VISITS

	Develop a relationship with the customer.
	Develop a relationship with the Sales department.
	Observe the customer’s facilities (the inventory, the condition of the equipment, the plant, the location and the attractiveness of retail operations, etc).
	Discuss financial information in more depth than is possible on the telephone.
	Review financial information that might otherwise be unavailable.
	Observe the impact of competitors and how their products are being used.
	Develop links between various internal company functions and their customer’s counterparts (i.e. the customer’s traffic department, advertising department, etc.).
	Resolve disputes.
	Join with the customer to visit lending institutions to help resolve liquidity problems.
	Provide advice to the customer with regard to his own receivables, and other matters.
	Collect money.

Please note that "Collect money" appears at the end of this list by design. Making collections the focus of the visit would mean ignoring all of the other factors that could make the collection effort more successful.”

Author: This writing is an excerpt from a paper by Norman Taylor - Director of Avondale Mills - presented at the NACM’s 102nd Credit Congress and Exposition. If you would like to read further on this topic please contact the NACM through: http://www.nacm.org/

Editor: Ron Wells