The importance of personal contact in the electronic era

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JBT Mexico's Jorge Brito - who will be present at this week's Expo Pack event in Guadalajara, Mexico from June 13-15 on stand 1106 - here explains why maintaining face-to-face contact with clients is vital, even in the modern, internet age.

For anyone analyzing how the way we do business has changed over the past 20 or 30 years, it is almost inevitable that the arrival of the internet into our daily lives will be one of the principal findings. From web pages to social media, it seems that the world of business and communications between companies revolves around the internet.

This phenomenon has delivered benefits for both suppliers and clients. For example, email has become a useful and important tool that makes contacting vastly easier than before. For those of us who experienced working in the 80s or 90s, who doesn’t remember the difficulties involved in sending letters by fax or the problems reading blurry messages when they arrived via the same machine? Or indeed the challenge of getting hold of people by telephone?

Even so, the importance of direct, personal contact with current and potential clients is hugely important for any business. Being able to put a face to a name can help develop a business relationship and engenders confidence.

Major presence As a food processing industry professional, I started my career with JBT Mexico 12 years ago following 15 years in the food sector. Beginning with the portfolio for preservation and canning technologies, I had responsibility not just for the Mexican market, but for the whole of Latin America.

Today, from my office in León, Guanajuato, I oversee the promotion of JBT’s Liquid Foods product line, covering fruit, dairy and tuna processing, as well as canning and preservation products. From León and our facilities in Puebla, where we have a pilot plant, we are well placed to serve the whole of Mexico, while also covering clients from Central America to the Andean region where we maintain a major presence in countries such as Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela.

In every case, establishing and maintaining personal contact has been a key factor in the success of JBT and our line of products across the whole of Latin America. As a company, face-to-face contact with clients has been fundamentally important to doing good business for JBT because, in spite of the technological revolution of recent decades, being able to establish a commercial relationship with a client in person remains priceless.