How to Protect Customer Trust as a Distributor

Being a distributor means competing on a margin-sensitive playing field where customer trust is your primary advantage. Today’s buyers, especially original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and Tier 1 manufacturers, expect immediate access to compliance data before they buy. When you can’t meet their needs, you risk losing out on the business and getting delisted as a supplier. 

And it doesn’t take much for customer trust to be broken: One incorrect piece of data can lead to product non-compliance, lost market access, and recalls. Distributors that invest in their compliance programs will stand head and shoulders above the competition.

And that means each time a customer sends a compliance data request, it’s a make-or-break moment. 

Will you prove you’re a reliable compliance partner by providing a rapid and accurate response, or will gaps in your records erode that customer’s trust? 

Read on for how-to advice from Assent’s supply chain experts that will keep your customer relationships rock solid and protect your bottom line.

Eliminate Manual Request Management 

A speedy response time is key to customer trust. But the typical distributor receives thousands of data requests each year, and that can slow down even the most organized compliance specialist. 

That’s why automating answers to repetitive and near-identical compliance inquiries is vital. The more you can take the manual work out of triaging emails or fetching compliance statuses from spreadsheets, the faster your team can respond. Plus, you free up time for risk mitigation and more strategic goals. 

Larger manufacturing companies have been using automation to keep up with rising compliance demands for many years, but there haven’t been compliance automation tools built specifically for distributors — until now. Assent’s AI-native platform for distributors, including our automated Request Manager, gives you the right level of compliance automation and regulatory monitoring to speed up response times while also reducing program costs. 

Our distributor compliance software is a self-serve way to easily manage and respond to customer requests for compliance data all in one place, along with workflows to rapidly collect regulatory compliance data for your product catalogue.

• Centralize all incoming requests. No more scattered spreadsheets or confusing email threads.

• Stop hunting for data. Our secure AI automatically parses, classifies, and connects requests to verified data you can trust. 

• Respond in minutes instead of hours. We take the manual effort out of compliance requests. 

• Work smarter, not harder. With the Assent distributor software managing the tasks that don’t require your hands-on expertise, your team can focus on your biggest clients. 

Proactively Identify Compliance Data Gaps 

A strong compliance program should provide up-to-date declarations for the most common customer compliance demands. These typically include:

• Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)
• Conflict minerals
• The Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) Regulation
• The Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive

However, these global rules are complex and change often. Distributors have massive product catalogues, and this makes it hard to tell which products are missing which regulatory compliance declarations. Those blind spots can quickly turn into costly customer escalations or lost business. To be a trusted distributor, you’ll need data for every regulation for every product (even if that means showing that a regulation doesn’t apply to that product). If you’re looking to improve your program, start by identifying the data gaps that will inevitably create friction and harm your reputation. 

Assent’s compliance software for distributors replaces the need for complicated, overlapping spreadsheets and gives you visibility into compliance statuses across your entire catalogue for REACH, RoHS, PFAS, and more. Our dashboards make it easy to proactively identify which products are missing declarations, so you can pinpoint your supplier engagement tasks to have a bigger impact in less time. 

Beat the Competition With Faster Data Access

As a distributor, you don’t need to deep dive into a product’s full supply chain every time a customer has a compliance data request. The data you need likely already exists in the public domain, supplier websites, or compliance certificates. You just need to locate it. 

It’s a common problem across the world’s supply chains. Requests for the same compliance declarations are sent thousands upon thousands of times by different parties, representing countless lost hours and wasted money. 

Instead of reaching out individually to each manufacturer, our distributor compliance software gives you a more efficient approach. The Assent Sustainability Network is the world’s most robust database of supplier data and compliance declarations. It lets you rapidly access data, like REACH certificates or PFAS declarations uploaded directly from millions of suppliers. You get large-scale data collection and automatic network matching against your SKUs to instantly fetch the data you need instead of reaching out to suppliers one by one. While you will still need to engage your suppliers for data to reach 100% declaration coverage, the Assent Sustainability Network can reduce the majority of your workload by matching your catalogue to millions of existing declarations.

And when you deliver compliance data to a customer within hours while your competitors take days or weeks, their trust in you skyrockets. 

How Distributors Like you Win

Distributors play a distinct role in global value chains, and when customers choose who to work with, they’re looking for someone who can not just fulfill orders on time, but who also deliver reliable compliance data with the same diligence. 

Assent has decades of experience working with the most complex manufacturing supply chains, and we’ve amassed an unbeatable network of compliance data. And now we’re putting that expertise to work for distributors with a platform designed specifically for them.

Talk to an Assent supply chain expert to learn how to improve your compliance program with advanced distributor compliance software. Get in touch today.