This time of year, as you reflect on your contingent workforce program’s capabilities and how to improve the value you deliver, you might employ a customer/stakeholder survey to help gain an understanding of your internal clients’ wants, needs and current satisfaction levels.
Customer surveys often include satisfaction and/or Net Promoter Score (NPS) inquiries, which are critical to understanding the status and strength of the CW program service value currently being delivered. However, these satisfaction/NPS-type scores are just a snapshot in time; it does not provide visibility to the changing needs of an evolving business landscape that is creating new innovations in how work requirements are getting done. To be able to improve their service levels and the overall value being delivered, CW program managers need further insight. There is a need to go beyond the “beauty contest” analysis in order to drive real effective change.
This is where cross-reference analysis comes into play.
Contingent workforce program managers can get a more in-depth view of satisfaction ratings by cross-referencing them to “service value” elements that engagement managers say are most important. An “importance-satisfaction” matrix can help direct CW program managers to key service delivery areas of high importance for engagement managers where satisfaction may be low. This analysis can also be conducted with other key stakeholders who engage the program, such as staffing partners and the contingent workers themselves.
The matrix also helps busy program managers identify where best to invest and enhance their program’s focus, capabilities and sometimes limited resources. This research technique could also provide critical insight where their efforts are having very little impact on the overall value perceptions of their engagement managers.
The accompanying graphic displays the cross-referencing technique of analyzing satisfaction rating data with importance rating data, using a 1-5 rating scale from satisfaction and importance survey questions. This analysis is sometimes referred to as the “service performance matrix.”
The satisfaction and importance cross-referencing technique is one needed enhancement of CW program stakeholder surveys. Another is the area of importance survey inquiries. While it’s critical to deploy questions on importance in a customer survey, one needs to cross-reference an importance inventory question with a forced-choice/ranking question on importance in the same survey tool. From a “wants and needs” perspective, it is key to understand the various value elements that CW program stakeholders perceive as important. Inventorying a quantity of these is the beauty contest-level analysis; the next-level analysis will rank or cross-reference this importance inventory with a forced-top importance element or rank the importance levels of key value elements. The key here is going beyond the simple importance ranking technique by adding up the number of times a service value element was mentioned as important in a survey population.
Mature contingent workforce programs have a fairly solid anecdotal perception of key stakeholders’ wants and needs. Through their ongoing interactions, the core requirements of CW program engagement management and stakeholders become fairly visible. How much do they care about informative dashboards versus getting the right talent at the right price/time? To best understand CW program engagement managers’/stakeholders’ evolving wants and needs, a more enhanced analysis is required.