It is 3:42 on a Thursday afternoon. You are twenty minutes into an unrelated meeting when the email arrives. The subject line says “urgent.” The sender is a procurement manager at one of your top five customers. The body is short and polite, but unmistakable: why, she asks, have we not heard from you about the delay to shipment 2051, which her operations team has just discovered from their own port agent. Her downstream production planning is now compromised. She would appreciate an explanation.
You know the delay she is talking about. Your operations team has known about it since Tuesday morning. A port congestion event has pushed the vessel’s ETA out by thirty-six hours, and further adjustments are possible. Your team has been working on the problem. They have not yet pushed a proactive notification to the customer because, in the honest internal conversation, they were hoping to resolve it before it became a customer-visible issue. It did not resolve. The customer found out from a third party. Now you are responding from behind.
This is a common pattern in bulk-commodity commercial operations, and it is also one of the most commercially expensive patterns. Every instance of it withdraws a small amount of customer trust. Over a year, across multiple customers, the withdrawals add up to the kind of relationship erosion we covered in Why Bulk Commodity Customers Really Leave. The individual events often feel minor to the producer. They rarely feel minor to the customer.
This post is about the proactive communication discipline that prevents this pattern. It is an argument for treating customer communication as an operational system rather than as an instinct, and for building the infrastructure that makes proactive communication the default rather than an occasional good intention. Commercial leaders who implement this discipline report a quieter inbox, warmer customer relationships, and renewal conversations that feel different. The change is structural, not stylistic.
Start by looking at the economics. Proactive communication about an issue, sent before the customer notices it through other channels, costs the producer a small amount of attention and credibility. The credibility cost is almost always positive: the customer thinks better of the producer for the proactive engagement, even when the news is bad.
A reactive communication, sent after the customer has discovered the issue elsewhere, costs the producer substantially more. The producer has to explain the issue, explain why the customer was not informed, and often absorb operational consequences the customer has already taken that they would not have taken with earlier information. The relationship bank account goes down. The magnitude of the debit is often larger than the magnitude of the credit a proactive message would have generated, because the proactive message carries positive relational value while the reactive message carries penalty.
Do the arithmetic across a year of operational events. A producer who proactively communicates on fifty events accumulates fifty small positive impressions. A producer who reacts to the same fifty events accumulates fifty small negative impressions. The difference over the year is not fifty times a small number; it is fifty times the combined magnitude of the two directions, because the gap between positive and negative impressions is not symmetric.
The asymmetry is structural. It applies across all customer relationships in bulk commodities, with mild variation by buyer sophistication. It persists across good and bad operational years, although bad years amplify the difference. The commercial leader who understands the asymmetry has every reason to invest in the proactive communication discipline; the commercial leader who treats communication as optional is, in effect, leaving commercial value on the table every month.
Given the clear economics, it is worth asking why most bulk commodity producers do not communicate proactively by default. The answer reveals several structural obstacles that must be addressed systematically, not through willpower alone.
The first obstacle is information latency. A proactive communication requires the producer to know about the issue before the customer does. In a typical fragmented-data operating environment, the producer’s visibility into unfolding operational events is not substantially better than the customer’s and is sometimes worse. By the time the producer can confirm the event, the customer has often found out through their own channels. We wrote about the architectural shape of this problem in Why Email-Based Bulk Logistics Coordination Is Quietly Costing You Millions Across Rail, Port and Vessels.
The second obstacle is ownership ambiguity. When a laycan is slipping, or quality is drifting, who should call the customer? The account manager who owns the commercial relationship? The operations coordinator who is closest to the operational facts? The senior executive whose credibility would lend weight? In most producers, this is not settled in advance, so nobody makes the call until the situation has deteriorated enough to force a decision about who calls.
The third obstacle is defensive instinct. There is a natural tendency to wait until you have a complete story before communicating. If the rake is delayed, wait until you know how long. If the sampling is showing variance, wait until you have the next sampling point. If the vessel is slow to load, wait until you know whether the delay will push past laytime. The instinct to “get all the facts first” is understandable, but it can lead to the wrong outcome. The customer benefits more from early partial information than from late complete information.
The fourth obstacle is calibration uncertainty. How do you know when an event is worth a call? A two-hour rail delay is routine. A twelve-hour delay might warrant communication. A thirty-six-hour delay clearly does. Without a defined threshold for each event type, the decision falls to individual judgment, leading to inconsistency, and inconsistency is worse than either universal caution or universal restraint, because the customer cannot predict what they will be told or what they will have to find out.
The fifth obstacle is tooling and time. In a busy operations environment, making five proactive phone calls takes an hour. Writing five structured emails takes longer. When the day is already full of firefighting, proactive communication loses out to the immediate operational demands, even when it has higher commercial value.
None of these obstacles is insurmountable. All of them are structural and require structural solutions. Willpower and good intentions are not enough; the operating model has to change.
Proactive customer communication is not a single practice. It is a set of distinct practices addressed to different types of events. Each has its own triggers, content, and cadence. Treating them as a single practice produces either over-communication (noise the customer tunes out) or under-communication (important events missed).
The first category is status communication on routine shipments. Regular updates on cargo that is on track, sent at defined moments (nomination confirmed, loaded, sailed, estimated arrival). These communications are short, structured, and predictable. They reassure the customer that the relationship is operating normally and build the baseline of engagement against which exception communications land. Status communication is often underrated because it is not tied to any specific event, but its cumulative effect on relationship texture is significant.
The second category is exception communication on developing issues. Updates when something is going wrong or likely to go wrong — a delay, a quality variance, a documentation issue, a port event. These communications are the highest-leverage category, because this is where the asymmetric economics operate most strongly. The trigger for exception communication should be defined in advance: specific events (a shipment moving beyond a defined threshold relative to plan), specific risk levels (probability of a laycan slip exceeding a defined percentage), or specific information gaps (failure to confirm an expected milestone by a defined time).
The third category is performance communication on a recently completed activity. Structured updates on how completed shipments performed against commitment: on volume, quality, timing, and documentation. These communications can be monthly or quarterly, and they carry particular weight because they demonstrate that the producer is tracking its own performance and willing to share the data. We covered the shape of these updates as part of the customer-retention discipline in “Why Bulk Commodity Customers Really Leave.”
The fourth category is forward-looking communication about capability and commitment. Updates about investments the producer is making in its operation, new systems, process improvements, and capacity additions that will benefit the customer over time. These communications, done well, signal that the producer is actively investing in the relationship. Done poorly, they can sound like marketing, so the tone and specificity matter.
The fifth category is senior-level relationship communication. Engagement from senior leadership, the CEO, the CFO, the commercial director, with the customer’s senior leadership, outside of specific issues, to build the kind of relationship that carries through when operational events inevitably happen. This is the hardest category to systematise because it is inherently personal, but producers who sustain it over the years reap disproportionate commercial returns.
Producers who consistently deliver across all five categories have a different kind of customer relationship from producers who only deliver the first two categories occasionally and under duress.
The surface of proactive communication, the calls, emails, and notifications the customer receives, rests on infrastructure that most producers do not currently have. Building the infrastructure is the work that converts communication from intermittent to systematic.
The first infrastructure element is event detection. The producer needs to know about operationally significant events as they unfold, not after the fact. This requires the kind of unified operational record we discussed in several earlier posts. If the delay information lives in the rail operator’s system, the quality drift is in LIMS, and the documentation issue is in an email inbox, nobody within the producer knows about the cluster of issues brewing. Detection fails at the data layer before it can succeed at the communication layer.
The second element is threshold definition. For each event type, what is the trigger for customer communication? Below the threshold, no call. Above it, call within a defined window. These thresholds should be set in advance for each customer, if necessary (major strategic customers may warrant tighter thresholds than spot customers), and reviewed periodically based on experience. Thresholds eliminate the calibration ambiguity that causes the decision to default to “wait and see.”
The third element is ownership assignment. For each event type and each customer relationship, who communicates? Named individual, not role. With a named backup. And with clear authority to act without needing a chain of approvals. Ownership assignment eliminates the coordination friction that turns a ten-minute call into a three-hour internal discussion about who should make it.
The fourth element is content templates. For each event type, what does good communication look like? Structure, tone, key information points, what to include, what not to include. Templates reduce the cognitive load on the communicator in the moment, ensure consistency across customers and across time, and raise the floor on communication quality. They should not be rigid scripts; they should be scaffolds that leave room for the specifics of the situation.
The fifth element is record-keeping. Every proactive communication should be logged: who called whom, when, about what, with what response. The log serves two purposes: it prevents duplicate communications and builds an evidentiary record of proactive discipline that can be shared with the customer during performance reviews and referenced in commercial disputes. The log also reveals, over time, patterns that inform improvement: which event types are most often communicated about, which customers get the most communications, and what the response pattern looks like.
These five infrastructure elements, together, make proactive communication sustainable. Producers who try to build the practice without the infrastructure find that it works for a quarter and then erodes. Producers who build the infrastructure find that the Practise becomes self-reinforcing as the team experiences how differently customers respond.
If you are building this discipline from scratch, these are the five communications that produce the highest early return. Systematise these first, and the rest tend to follow.
Producers who systematise these five communications reliably report that the asymmetric economics start working in their favour within one to two quarters. Customer relationships warm. Operational events become opportunities to demonstrate discipline rather than threats that require absorbing damage. Renewal conversations take on a different tone.
Proposing this discipline surfaces a predictable set of objections from inside the producer. Each is worth engaging with.
We do not want to bother the customer. A common framing that is usually wrong. Customers in bulk commodities, particularly at the senior procurement and commercial level, are not bothered by structured, well-timed communication. They are bothered by surprise and by inattention. The “do not bother them” framing usually reflects the producer’s discomfort with the conversations, rather than the customer’s preference.
Our operations team is too busy for this. Usually accurate about the current configuration, and a reason to change the configuration rather than accept it. A thirty-minute proactive call avoids the three-hour reactive session with an upset customer and the follow-up damage control that can consume days. The team is not too busy for proactive communication; the team is structurally configured for reactive communication.
We do not have the data infrastructure. Partly true for most producers today. The remedy is to build the infrastructure in parallel with the communication discipline. The first five communications described above can be initiated with modest infrastructure; the fuller version of the discipline requires the investment outlined in this post and in other posts in this series.
We do not want to commit to thresholds we might miss. A legitimate concern. The response is that the threshold is not a commitment to perfect performance; it is a commitment to communicate when performance falls outside the threshold. Missing a threshold becomes a trigger for communication, not a basis for a commercial penalty. Customers understand the distinction and value the honesty.
Our customers prefer not to hear from us too often. Rarely true. Some customers prefer low-volume communication, and the discipline should be tuned to their preference. But even the most communication-averse customers prefer structured proactive updates to surprise discoveries of issues. The discipline should be calibrated to the customer, not abandoned because some customers prefer quieter relationships.
Building the discipline requires leadership Practise, not just process. Specifically, three leadership habits matter.
These three leadership practices are not onerous. They require attention, not time. And they are what convert a process commitment into a cultural norm.
There is a surprising benefit to building this discipline that is not obvious at the start. An operation that communicates proactively tends, over time, to run more smoothly. The reason is that the discipline of looking ahead to identify what the customer should be told also surfaces issues for the producer’s own attention. The event that would have triggered a customer call at the threshold is often addressed before it reaches it. The forward-risk view shared with the customer is also the internal risk view that drives operational attention.
Producers who have built the discipline report, as a secondary effect, report that their operational firefighting loads drop. The forward-looking cadence, both internally and externally, shifts the operation from reactive to anticipatory. The work becomes less exhausting. The team becomes more engaged. Retention improves. The compounding benefits of the discipline extend well beyond customer relationships, though those relationships are where the argument usually starts.
The best customer call is the one you make before they have to call you. The commercial value of making that call is substantial, and the required infrastructure is buildable. The producers who make it are the producers who win the decade.
Nick Ogle has over 30 years of experience in Enterprise IT, spanning engineering, sales, and marketing roles across Australia, the USA, and APJ for various IT vendors.
Nick is passionate about entrepreneurship and Software innovation that drives positive change. Currently, he is the Sales & Marketing Manager at SCIAR Systems, a Newcastle-based SAAS startup, where he is helping commercialise their groundbreaking Bulk Commodity Logistics solutions.
For more information on Nick and to find articles that have been written on the IT sector in the past, feel free to look at his LinkedIn profile or browse some of the additional articles Nick has written for SCIAR.