CC Photo by Hannah Busing
The best relationships aren’t built by finding a supplier with the right culture – they’re built when buyers actively bring their own culture, values, and customer mission into the partnership.
Culture Isn’t a Procurement Decision
If you look at the advice that management consultants offer about how to find the right partner for a long-term business relationship they often say ‘find a partner with a matching culture.’ The implication is always that the buyer must find a partner with a corporate culture that resembles or complements their own.
I don’t know how often this advice is ever followed. The long check-list of questions on RFPs rarely delve deep into culture and the attributes that create alignment.
There’s also a flawed assumption worth challenging: that the supplier must always bend to fit the buyer’s culture. This isn’t a procurement exercise – it’s not a one-time purchase. When you’re contracting a partner to manage your customer service, you’re typically signing a multi-year commitment, and before long, your partner becomes how your customers see you.
Culture Is a Shared Responsibility
Buyers have a responsibility here too. They need to bring their brand, their mission, and their energy into the relationship — and work collaboratively with the supplier to build and sustain a culture that works for both sides.
This doesn’t only apply to the customer experience contracts. It’s true that this is especially important for CX, but sharing culture and a vision for the business is equally important for technology outsourcing, revenue operations, or other business processes that can be outsourced.
It is mainly the buyer’s responsibility to bring their customer experience philosophy to the table. They need to define how customers see their business – it’s entirely about their culture. Their mission, and their sense of why customers should be excited by their brand.
Culture Is Built Through Engagement
There are many ways this can happen. On-site visits, Quarterly Business Reviews, engagement with leaders, regular awards, engagement on the floor, and maintaining a strong relationship with team leads and operational managers. Inviting team members to go and visit the client to soak up the culture. This can be a powerful way to create a team of cultural ambassadors.
Attrition – particularly in contact centers – is often handed back to the supplier as entirely their problem to solve. But this is precisely where a culturally engaged client can make an outsized difference. A client that actively connects with the team working on their account can directly shape morale, influence the culture within that team, and have a meaningful impact on retention.
What Great Clients Actually Do
There was one client I worked with who used to visit our site and insist that each of the 20 team leaders give a presentation about the performance of their team. The contact center operation team were presenting directly to the client and naming high performers and their strategies for helping lower performers.
They didn’t need to meet the entire operational team – a management update would have sufficed. But by taking the time to hear directly from the frontline, they signaled something far more valuable: commitment. A genuine willingness to understand what was working and what wasn’t. And for the team presenting, it did something else entirely – it built confidence and a real sense of ownership in the work they were doing.
I have also worked with clients who liked to spend time on the contact center floor without any management guiding them to a few well-coached high performers. They wanted to be free to go and talk to anyone. It wasn’t to spy or catch them out – it was so they could feel like they were a part of the action, they were on the front lines, they could feel like they were with the team and they could truly understand what the team needed.
Great Culture Has Nothing to Do With the Industry
It’s also important to say that an exciting culture doesn’t always come from the type of business. It’s easy to say that a video game company is an exciting brand to work for, but a bank (or any company seen as less glamorous) can also build a great team culture.
You could work in a contact center for a bank and feel like the client sees you, supports you, and understands what you need to thrive – you could also work for a video game company that doesn’t care about morale and never visits your team.
Culture Begins After the Contract Is Signed
To my mind, it is clear that culture isn’t a pre-contract checkbox exercise. It’s not something you can scan for during an RFP, score in a spreadsheet, or test by asking a supplier to describe their values.
Culture is what happens after the contract is signed. It is built in the way problems are solved, how metrics are discussed, how frontline teams are treated, and whether both sides feel they are working toward the same customer promise – do we share the same goals?
In customer experience and revenue operations this is critical. If a supplier is managing your customer conversations, then they are not sitting outside your brand –they are part of how your brand is experienced every day. That means the buyer cannot stand back and demand, “show us your culture.” They need to bring their own culture into the relationship and help build something together.
The Best Partnerships Build One Mission
The weakest outsourcing relationships are built on distance – here are your targets, here are the penalties, now go and deliver. The strongest are built on ownership – these are our customers, these are our challenges, now let’s go and solve them together.
That is the real test of culture. Not whether two companies sound alike in a sales presentation, but whether they can create a shared sense of mission once the real work begins.
Originally published here.