The subject of signposting comes up regularly. We do it as the Office of the Small Business Commissioner, the banks do it, business advisers and accountants do it. Does it work?
Signposting to other organisations when asked a question by a business, that we can’t answer because it’s outside our remit, isn’t our area of expertise or another organisation can deal with better, should help where people haven’t know where to turn, and seem a good way of fulfilling our duty to the client, customer or consumer but is it?
Signposting may make us feel better about our inability to help directly but what is the end result? We rarely know because the person we’ve signposted rarely comes back to tell us how it went. My guess has always been that there are fewer good outcomes than we’d like to believe. When I worked in the charity sector research by an organisation (and I no longer remember which. If you read this and you know about this report please contact me) showed that signposting doesn’t work for an astonishingly high proportion of people because they don’t make contact with the organisation they been signposted to.
I was thinking about this when I stumbled across a post on LinkedIn from Dr Chris Fitch who is, among other things, the Vulnerability lead at the Money Advice Trust (which runs Business Debtline, the charity that gives free help to small businesses in debt). He set out very clearly that people want ‘Tell us Once’ systems where they can tell their story once and there’s a process by which it can reach other relevant and appropriate organisations if necessary, without them having to retell it: they want to share their support needs not just flag that they need support; and they want to control which organisations see their data.
If we at OSBC are contacted by someone they are usually in distress because they haven’t been paid when they expected and as a result are having problems getting the money from a recalcitrant customer and are in danger of going under because they can’t manage their cashflow. When we can’t help, usually because ‘it’s outside our remit’, that can sound like we don’t care and people feel let down. We do care and we’re very frustrated when we have to say we can’t help so we look for a nugget of hope in the form of another organisation that should/might be able to help. However, if the business owner has had to muster up the courage and find the time to contact us the chances are s/he won’t want to go through it all again only to be told that someone else can’t help and they could spend days contacting different organisations when they need that time to run the business. Many simply don’t get the support they need.
Chris Fitch says people don’t want to spend time ‘telling us in turn’ or having to spell out their support needs over and over again by ‘telling the many’, and worrying about who has their data. Can we design a better system? I’m sure we can. There are issues with sharing data and gathering consent, but this isn’t insurmountable.
Imagine as a business support person how much better we’d all feel if we knew the person who called or emailed had got the support they needed without having to be passed around organisations. We build trust and better relationships between the support system and business owners who would have more time to get on with running a better, more resilient, efficient and sustainable business. We’d all win, including a more productive economy.
Until the answer is built, please:
- Understand that the first organisation you contact may not have the answer but they may well know another that does;
- Be patient with us all because many of us will have been, like OSBC, set up with a specific remit set out on detailed legislation and we can’t reach out beyond that remit for fear of legal action;
- Follow up with recommendations when you are signposted because it may be the best tool we have at our disposal currently;
- Share information with others in your network. People are more likely to take recommendations from their peers than from organisations they don’t know;
- Use your communities and networks to help get to the sources of information you need.
Please don’t give up because the first organisation you approach doesn’t have the answer. The UK economy and wider society needs its small and micro businesses to have the right support at the right time for the stage their business is at in order to achieve the level of growth and productivity we all need. We all have a role to play.
