Whether or not customers feel they can lean on a business will be the biggest selling point in a disruption-riddled world.

During strategy sessions, business leaders should ask themselves candidly what they think it would take to send customers into the arms of the competition.

This may sound like an unpleasant, even awkward, way to think about it. But following a global pandemic, major supply chain and labor market issues, and more than half a decade after the Harvard Business Review strongly encouraged executives to “keep up with their customers, not their competitors,” it is time for a fresh approach to business differentiation. Such an approach will go beyond the uniqueness of products and services, transcending both customer expectations and the need to deliver more sustainable solutions.

From our own experiences, we strongly believe that if customers are looking for products that work and allow them to fulfill their own goals, someone to count on is an even greater priority.

First and foremost, we think of ourselves as creators. And any kind of creator, from a visual artist to a plastics manufacturer, starts with a concept. Like a small seedling, this begets prototypes, which in turn gives rise to an observable end result ready to be sent out in the world.

That, at least, is the idea. In practice, new thoughts can inspire new takes on the original design. Often, prototyping reveals unexpected challenges that require a return to the drawing board in order to clarify or refine the product. Underlying it all is the client’s expectation for as rapid and efficient a turnaround as possible. With all of this in mind, even as we have sought to become more sustainable in our practices and product development, reliability has remained our lodestar as a company.

When problems happen, they can and do get fixed quickly, abetted by a stable but straightforward command structure, equipment and tool stability – particularly from an information technology perspective – and robust quality assurance processes. As a result, we have consistently found that, across a wide variety of plastic products, the fact that we are there for the customer without disruption, whatever else is going on in the economy or world at large, is our biggest feedback point.

This begs the question of, why – besides the obvious importance of customer satisfaction – is reliability the next metric for businesses of all industries, sizes and types? Does embedding it into a company’s DNA result in a stronger enterprise even on the inside?

Several arguments suggest this is so. First, disruptions will continue, and businesses have no choice but to adapt. “Crisis mode,” the preferred phrase in response to the sudden shifts necessitated in operations and practices, is no longer an option in the post-COVID world, particularly as many of the challenges that arose then and were assumed or hoped to be temporary are obviously here to stay. This includes labor shortages, supply chain hiccups, and continued price inflation. From the customer’s standpoint, research supports a need for highly adaptable and predictive operational models, one less reliant on surveys and check-ins of customer feelings and pain points and embracing proactive, rapidly responsive alternatives. Writing about prediction as the future of customer experience or CX models, consultants at McKinsey urged businesses to focus on use cases that can drive quick value, considering how a predictive model can better enhance solutions that have a direct impact on customer loyalty as well as cross-sell and up-sell. In other words, a deeper understanding of customer wants and needs will be at the center of a new definition of business reliability.

Successful systems and practices also reinforce reliability from the inside. On the ground floor of operations, so to speak, is how teams interact with one another and engage with their projects. The reliability metric encourages an inner accountability metric to flourish, where rather than deadlines being imposed as a demand from above, innovators in a company are inspired to incorporate time alongside other project quantifiers as design, resource use, ease of transport and handling.

In a now-obsessed society, reliability can also offer an appropriate balance between excellence, stability and speed. “As soon as possible” takes on new meaning, metamorphosing from a phrase of deferral to one that indicates the company’s systems will deliver a quality product as rapidly as quality itself allows. In our case, this meant the ability to complete physical, on-time product deliveries when supply chains were broken down, and focusing on key ingredients and packaging components, so that the last thing customers had to worry about is the status of their plastic bottles.

Reliability goes hand-in-hand with reassurance, and in times where disruption is so typical as to have become a cliché, that a company is reliable at its core is arguably the biggest selling point for customers. What you offer as a company – or what any competitor offers – can change, but what you do is a way of life.