The value of destination services is not in doubt – but demonstrating this to procurement teams, HR departments and corporate decision-makers is another matter. Drawing on her interviews for FIDI’s new DSP white paper, FIDI’s Sustainability and Communications Manager, Magali Horbert, explains why the industry needs a stronger, more consistent way to tell its story.
There is a conversation that has been circling the international relocation industry for years. You can hear it at conferences, in procurement negotiations, and in the frustration of professionals who believe, with absolute certainty, that what they do is important – but they struggle to prove it to the people holding the budget.
When I set out to write FIDI’s white paper on the value of destination service providers (DSPs), I expected to find a marketing and communication problem. However, what I found was a challenge that runs far deeper: a whole industry that has not yet developed the shared language, tools or collective will to make its value visible to audiences that hold the decision power. That is a problem for DSPs, for moving companies, and for our industry – and it is one we can only address together.
A race nobody is winning
The pattern is familiar across the industry: a corporate client puts out a request for proposals; an RMC passes the pressure downstream; a competitor enters at a lower rate, which becomes the new baseline; then the cycle begins again.
As Kay Kutt, CEO of Silk Relo, puts it: ‘We race to the bottom – and when we get there, we may well drown together.’
What struck me most during the interviews was not the obvious frustration (which I expected), but the honesty about shared responsibility.
Sophie Rehberg, of ProfOrg Global Mobility, says: ‘There are a lot of people who are willing to deliver services for sums that are not necessarily economically sustainable. We have participated in a certain destruction of our own market. We let it happen.’
The white paper does not apportion blame to any one part of the chain. It’s a cumulative problem, and our response must be co-ordinated.
Two sides of the same industry
One thing the conversations made clear is that each part of our industry carries assumptions about the other that are not quite fair. DSPs sometimes underestimate what an international household goods operation actually entails: the complexity of handling customs across borders and regulations, the liability exposure, the impact of geopolitics. Moving companies, in turn, can underestimate what destination services involve when they are carried out properly.
As Irina Yakimenko, of Intermark, whose company operates across both worlds, explains: ‘If you think of DSP services, very often we have to provide upfront rental payment deposits, our service sometimes lasts six months, and we’re paid at the very end.’ Neither side is simply shifting boxes or holding hands. Both are managing complexity that is largely invisible to the people who are signing off the budget.
What both sides also share – and what I think is the deeper point – is a common failure to tell their story well.
A household goods move is not ‘just’ the shifting of ‘stuff in boxes’; it is the dismantling and reassembly of someone’s home, often involving extreme logistical complexity. DSP is not ‘just’ hand-holding; it is the difference between a family that settles and one that quietly falls apart a few months in, or a high-flying employee who quits because they didn’t feel supported enough during one of the most stressful experiences of their lives.
Both industries know their own intrinsic value, and both are struggling to find a consistent, compelling way to communicate that adds value to the people who most need to understand it.
The prevention zone
This is the core of the DSP value problem: DSPs operate in the ‘prevention zone’, i.e. the lease dispute that never happened, the school place secured because a consultant knew the admissions timeline, the family that settled without incident because someone was quietly working on their behalf. ‘Prevention services’ generate no obviously visible data. There is no claim, no complaint, no escalation; the assignment just works.
That is enormously valuable, and also enormously hard to sell – especially as procurement functions with cost-reduction KPIs have taken on growing authority over global mobility spend, and the institutional knowledge that once allowed DSP value to be taken on trust has eroded, inside both corporate HR teams and RMCs.
Making the case for our industry, in numbers and in stories
The most consistent practical finding from the research is also the most straightforward: track everything, then communicate it. Cost avoidance reporting (such as documenting rental savings negotiated, temporary accommodation days avoided, deposits returned in full) is the most powerful tool available to the DSP industry, and one of the least systematically used. When Irina Yakimenko and Marina Semenova, of Intermark, present clients with a comparison of costs avoided against fees paid, the ratio almost always favours the DSP service. The figures are not complex to capture and don’t need fancy technology, just discipline and consistency.
But data alone is not enough. The most effective value conversations I heard combined numbers with stories: anonymised, concrete accounts of what went wrong when support was absent, or what was prevented when it was present. This applies equally to household goods moving: the weight on a Bill of Lading tells a procurement team very little about what it actually means to move a family internationally. The human story behind that move is what builds the case for quality over price. However, neither side of our industry does this well enough.
A collective problem requires a collective answer
No single company is going to solve this alone. What came through clearly in every conversation I had for this white paper is that the building blocks for action already exist: measurement frameworks, common language for different audiences, data on assignment outcomes. However, developing and standardising them requires collective effort. Individual companies, particularly smaller ones, cannot build the necessary infrastructure independently. There is a real role here for industry associations such as FIDI, working with partners across the entire supply chain, to develop the shared tools the industry needs.
The value of what we do is not in question. What is missing is a coordinated, evidence-based effort to make it visible, to the procurement managers, HR teams and corporate decision-makers who shape the conditions in which this industry operates. That is the work we have ahead of us.
Read the full white paper, Proving the value of destination services in a cost-driven world, at www.fidi.org/publications.