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The Platinum Standard

Updated: Aug 3, 2021



During a recent round of inductions, we were experiencing some technical issues whilst trying to set up a new member of the team remotely with one of our favourite courses on diversity and inclusion. If you are interested in the course on inclusion and unconscious bias in the workplace then you can find it here.


It is the same course we like to use for every induction we do as it struck a chord with Director Joe Postings the very first time that he watched it. He was inspired by the expert delivery of Arianna Huffington and Vernā Myers who hosted the course, and who came across as two women who could quite easily be seen as people to look up to. People who were clearly passionate about the subject at hand.


JSP Credit Management is deeply passionate about inclusion and diversity, boasting a small team, but all of which belong to a minority group in one way or another, and having recently decided upon their core values as a business to make diversity at the heart of them. However, on this occasion of watching the course, it was not a diversity-related lesson that got picked up this time.


The clue is in the title. I dare say there is probably hardly anyone who is reading this blog that has not heard of the “gold standard”. We have been hearing it on TV adverts or reading it in magazine and newspaper articles for decades. We have even come across the term in academic literature, and it has become commonly known as the highest possible standard for whatever context the phrase is being used for.


Whether it is coffee, research in psychology, some sporting achievement, it has been used in all kinds of different ways to represent an aspect of human behavior and psychology that appears to have been seducing people’s interest for as long as time began. People just seem to be obsessed with perfection, or extraordinary superhuman endeavour.


During a particularly difficult period during Director Joe Postings’ undergraduate degree in psychology, which he completed part-time while also holding down a very demanding role for one of the top 10 law firms in the world, he resorted to listening to motivational videos on YouTube to help him overcome cases of extreme demotivation, exhaustion or procrastination.


During one of the podcasts that he found himself listening to, he remembers hearing two very well-known names in the celebrity world, one of whom is famous as a motivational speaker and life coach, talk about how they had got to where they are today. One of them said that he has only ever had about 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night and that he chose to do that because “you sleep when you're dead”.


There was a clear implication that sleeping less resulted in higher levels of success as it allowed more time to focus on the things which had been so helpful to him throughout his career. Coupled with stories of how he had made his millions and how many expos he had done in just about every city in the world to millions of people, it was hard not to find ourselves agreeing with him.


The point is, we know what it feels like to strive for perfection and to be constantly looking for improvement in every corner of our business. We have experienced that feeling of inadequacy that has come with the feeling of just standing still as if that is some kind of almightly failure, let alone the feeling of going backwards. However, there was a subtle lesson learned about it from having watched that course again on unconscious bias recently.


According to Vernā Myers, the gold standard says that we should treat people how we would like to be treated ourselves. But the platinum standard, in the context of inclusion at work, says that we should treat people how they would like to be treated. The leap from one to the other is quite a bit larger than we had originally thought having passively taken it in on the previous occasions we had heard it.


The mindset which we have been guilty of being consumed by at times, has sometimes led us to be so centred on what we think the right thing to do for the credit management industry is, that we have lost sight of what it is that our clients need from us, albeit briefly. Yes, we have been guilty of focussing on business priorities which would benefit us more than our clients, until we heard that phrase: The platinum standard.


This prompted a re-evaluation of our service levels to our clients and in our own honest assessment of things, we concluded that things were, well let’s just say, a bit clunky. For a company that is so interested in continuous improvement, we have relied on an awful lot of manual, time-consuming processes since our inception and we have decided to make a bit of a change to that, and to our most sought after service, the debt collection service.


After some serious hours reading Microsoft learning documents of seemingly biblical proportions we have upskilled the team on various ways to automate our processes involved in undertaking our debt recovery activities and although it is not the finished product yet we believe we have made enough progress to announce the changes we have planned.


One of the most immediate changes that clients will notice is that we now have a new way to instruct on debt recovery cases which is going mean that for our international clients, of which we have more than UK based clients, they can now submit an instruction to us to act even after official office hours and their requirements will still be being met in the background while the team at JSP Credit Management are sound asleep (or mindlessly watching useless YouTube videos at 3 am).


The new feature can be accessed very easily on our website, or by clicking here and we also plan to enable this to link automatically to an in-house database which will prompt our collection activities to happen within 24 hours. Eventually, we want to open up this system to our clients so that they can log in at the click of a button and find out the latest status of their cases with us, at any time of day or night.


So who knew that a passion for equality and diversity could have such wide-ranging benefits? Well, I guess not us, but for today we are happy to admit that we are not perfect and if those imperfections are the catalyst for an even great customer experience as we hope they have been here then we will take them all day. Obviously, we remain very mindful of the main benefits of being an equality and diversity conscious employer too!


We are here to do a bit to businesses safeguard their cash flow against late payers or debtors that are refusing to pay, so if you have been struggling to get an invoice paid and would appreciate the support of a team who pride themselves on operating in a way that is mindful of the above then visit our website at www.jspcreditmanagement.co.uk and contact us to discuss your needs. We operate on a no-win-no-fee basis for bad debt recovery and our credit control and credit risk services can be ordered via our website with the littlest of hassle.


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