Imagine a world where you can tell how reliable a person is before you work or get into any engagement with them. Think of how much less frustration there would be in the world because of it. Every human being has a general reliability score, it just isn’t public. Bad clients are more often than not bad clients with most of their contractors. The same goes for great clients.
This is a problem that has been painfully close to me in recent times while working as a consultant and freelancer. You accept a project, agree on timelines, milestones, payment terms and everything in between. Yet somehow, things still manage to get out of hand. Delayed payments, out of scope requests, excuses and overworking have become the order of the day. Having an eye for problems and solving them, I thought to myself; there must be a better way. And as it turns out… There is. While watching an episode of black mirror, I was reminded of this idea and the repercussions it could have. Still, in this variation, there is a lot more to gain than lose.
So this is around where the idea comes in
A public repository of all clients everyone works with rated by 4 key factors:
- Payments – Do they pay what they owe, do they pay on time?
- Timeliness – Do they stick to deadlines or do they drag a project on for too long?
- Workability – How easy are they to work with?
- Recommendability – How likely are you to recommend them to someone? (We’ll prefill this based on the first 3 factors, you can adjust accordingly)
- Communication – How effectively do they communicate?
What will this mean for the world?
Unreliable clients will get less business while reliable clients get more business. It becomes easier to do business because people get to keep their word. Everyone will have a reliability index, a measure of how reliable they are and later on, this would be as paramount as a credit score. Human beings will have to either be reliable or face consequences. All in all, a better place for business to be conducted.
No one likes unreliability. With reliability index, we will be one step closer to solving that part of the equation.
