In the Age of Consumerism, companies are finding themselves being more customer service-orientated than ever. This notion came to me in an ordeal that I experienced during a recent move. In my quest for the best professional cleaning service (where I needed to remove black mold), like many prospective customers, I surveyed my network.
Let’s analyze the first step in selecting a vendor; requesting referrals. Some might argue that you cannot receive a better lead than one that has been referred to you by a past client. I reached out to my personal network because I knew they would provide me with genuine unbiased recommendations. As the Director of RPO for Yoh, I know the value of a credible reputation. Even the best referral would think twice about considering your service if it was paired with a bad review.
After having vetted and selected my prospective cleaners, I began perusing each of the vendor's past customer reviews, service offerings and price structures. As a provider of service myself, you can argue that I’m much more critical than your average consumer. That’s because I deeply value the relationship between the provider and consumer. I understand it only takes one miss-step to break that trust.
To bring my cleaning story home, I ultimately chose a vendor with one of the highest price points and who promised to leave my home gleaming. While they upheld their price, they failed to deliver on their promise, and left my home looking the way it did when I started this whole exercise.
I've listened to client's share stories of past RPO vendors who failed to deliver on their promise; and that’s true in any line of business. The silver lining; now more than ever, you can take a proactive approach to evaluating service providers, be it RPO or house cleaners.
Three key qualifiers to use when selecting a new service provider
Core Values
There is always a slide in our presentation to new customers that shows the customer’s values alongside our values. I never stopped to digest how highly important that is to selling our services. We talk about our values on every call we have internally, and for our customers, it shows our sincerity. We fundamentally start the conversation at our core values – not the sale.
Get the Service Story
Whether you have the ability to check online reviews or ask for customer referrals, proactively obtaining reviews is the number one way to gain critical insight on how your future provider does business.
We do this at Yoh by presenting past case studies, customer testimonials, past references, and survey data to show the impact of our RPO Staffing Solutions.
Ask for the Data
As a recruiting and staffing solutions provider, we work in one of the most complicated lines of business; human capital. Simply stated, recruiting is typically based on gut. Letting it go can be even more challenging, but it's always good practice to base a decision on data versus gut.
Take our customers for example. Many who have never had the data to rely on in the past, now have an array of data points at their fingertips. We work with these types of clients to make sense of the facts, figures and trends for help with forecasting, cost savings and future hiring needs.
This blog was written by Katie Duffy. Katie is a staffing and recruiting professional with more than 15 years of experience in corporate staffing and consulting services. She currently serves as an RPO Director for Yoh and leads a full RPO engagement for a global agribusiness company. Katie’s expertise spans operations management; large account development and management; developing and implementing talent strategies; start-up experience; recruiting and resource management; and management of professional recruiting staff.
