Lingering Thoughts

I can’t help but linger on the current political climate of my workplace.  Amongst the escalated calls and exceptions that my colleagues and I make with customers, we are to be much, much, much more lenient:  The Company has decided that we should do pretty much whatever we can to keep a customer.

Mind you, I work in the receivables management department:  And, typically, many people who call this department aren’t exactly the happiest customers, let alone the occasional batch of kooks or dinks that we get calls from.  

As business textbooks will tell you, and my current supervisor’s intent, the job of a supervisor—even a quasi-supervisor such as myself—is to add value to an organization.  My supervisor most equated this to our ability to have customers who give us high ratings in industry-wide surveys and our company’s stock price.  Knowing full well that stock prices are an irrational element in economics, I have a couple conflicting thoughts about this.

Stock price can be tied to earnings or otherwise just how a particular group of investors are feeling on a given day.  This wonderful dynamic has been studied by many disciplines.  Regardless…if we are making as many exceptions as we have been ordered to make, isn’t that going to have a direct effect on profits?  This, in turn, will have an effect on the stock price when we report lower earnings.  Or will the cost of customers purchase enough good reputation to offset what it is costing us?  Will there be economic spillover that hasn’t been foreseen?

However, on the other side…history has been known to repeat itself.  This, I have been told, happened once upon a time, in a different incarnation of the business.  But maybe, just maybe, one should start counting their blessings and begin thinking about implementation of a “Plan B.”