Pinstripe’s RPO Analyst Day: Talent Forward

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

I attended Pinstripe’s analyst day on May 15, 2013. It was combined with its Client Talent Forward Summit, with the theme “Commitment to Innovation”. Highlights of the day included:

Client Panel

Pinstripe discussed 10 recent innovations, of which a panel of four Pinstripe clients then discussed a few Pinstripe innovations that have benefitted their business, including:

• Email campaigning: A proactive approach to creating candidate pools with active and passive candidates. This enables messaging a high number of candidates with relevant information – such as familiarizing candidates with potential hiring company announcements; e.g. “Did you happen to know we were named one of the best places to work 4 years in a row” or “We were rated as the safest operating room to work in St. Louis”. Email Campaigning has resulted in a two-to-three times increase in passive candidate responses
• Video interviewing: Both live and prerecorded interviews of candidate presentations. Managers feel more informed of when to take candidates to the next step. Team interviewing is also conducted
• Employment branding and social recruiting: All about making a connection with the candidate to “get them in the door”. Includes training and education on how to properly use social media to send out positive messages.

Client Tour

We toured the Brookfield facility where ~60% of employees work. The tour included:

• Understanding how employees are recognized
• How virtual employees are connected and communicated with as though they were onsite in Brookfield
• Demos of some of the innovations, including email campaigns to build talent pipelines
• A visit to the Impression Center.

The Impression Center, which receives 250k calls per year, is staffed by customer service experts who are imperative to potential candidates’ first impression of the company. Applicants and candidates can call the center with questions throughout the job offer, and live chat is also offered. First call resolution is 96% with 97% customer satisfaction. Over 63k interviews have been scheduled by the Impression Center. Candidates may still contact the recruiter if needed; however, by using the Impression Center there has been a 97% reduction of calls to recruiters, allowing them to focus on their primary concern – recruiting.

Pinstripe Analyst Briefing

Pinstripe has grown from ~450 employees and ~73,000 hires in 2011 to ~575 employees today and nearly 100,000 hires in 2012. Most recruitment contracts at Pinstripe are end-to-end, full service RPO as opposed to projects. Several of the more recent contracts have been second- and third-generation RPO clients. Pinstripe’s partnership with Ochre House, formed in 2009 to deliver RPO in EMEA and Asia-Pacific, has been awarded several contracts to fill multi-regional hiring needs. Both companies attribute their success to sharing similar values. Honeywell is an example of a second-generation client now expanding beyond North America to Europe that Ochre House will serve. Combined with Ochre House, RPO is provided to ~85 clients in 45 countries in 23 languages.

Summary

One of the key messages taken from this summit is that Pinstripe is keenly focused on the candidate experience and a positive work environment for its employees to excel at satisfying client needs. It is therefore of no surprise that Pinstripe recruiters have an average of >9 years’ experience.

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RPO Generation 2.0 is Ready to Go

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is one of the younger HRO service lines and it is both growing and maturing quickly. The March issue of HRO Today recognizes the emergence of RPO 2.0.  NelsonHall’s RPO specialist, Gary Bragar, would certainly agree. Gary’s October 2012 Targeting Recruitment Process Outsourcing market analysis highlighted many of the same developments in this rapidly growing HRO segment.

What is New in RPO 2.0?

The rapid growth and incorporation of social media for recruiting is a big part RPO 2.0, one that keeps pushing RPO to the leading edge of innovation in the HRO space.

RPO services are rapidly moving up the value chain, and changing client expectations is the key. While reducing the cost of service provision is always on the table, it is no longer the number one issue. Flexibility and scalability will always remain important as well, given how quickly hiring needs can change.

Today’s RPO 2.0 clients are looking for more value:

• Improved quality of hires
• The latest tools and technologies for social and mobile
• Expertise in accessing talent pools and passive hires
• Greater focus on candidate experience
• Analytics and insights, in addition to metrics and reports
• Improved retention
• Access to advanced services including employment branding, talent management, talent engagement, and integration with workforce planning.

Clients Simply No Longer Want To Do It

In the last few years, many buyers reduced internal recruiting staff in line with the reduced volume of hires, and they do not want to rebuild and reinvest in the rapidly evolving technologies and advanced skill sets it takes to succeed in today’s competitive, social, mobile, and global recruitment process market.

Buyer Choice is Broad

For every large staffing company that does RPO including Adecco, Kelly, Manpower, and Randstad, there are smaller vendors that specialize in RPO such as Ochre House and Pinstripe.   Most leading RPO vendors of all sizes can offer services in most of the regions of the world as they have partnered and made acquisitions to make their footprints global.

Not long ago, major multi-process HRO (MPHRO) providers either did not provide end-to-end RPO or saw it taken out of contracts. Now, more MPHRO providers have full RPO services strong enough to be offered as standalone services including ADP, Aon Hewitt, Infosys, and IBM.

With RPO 2.0 You Can Have It All

While having it all may still be a bit aspirational for most of us, we are finding evidence that successful client / provider RPO partnerships can improve process efficiencies (e.g., reduce time to hire 20% to 50%), reduce the total cost of hire (often 20% to 30% or more), along with increasing hiring manager and candidate satisfaction.

Imagine what we can achieve with RPO 2.0!

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HR Tech Another Success: Part I

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

HR Tech was again a very worthwhile investment of my time. Here are some highlights of the new Outsourcing Track presentations I attended:

• Cisco Uses RPO to Help Hire Up to 15,000 a Year:Using a hybrid co-ownership model, the Randstad Sourceright recruitment team works alongside the Cisco recruitment team to provide services including sourcing, recruiting, and onboarding. Services provided are primarily in the Americas, but may expand into EMEA and possibly Asia where Randstad Sourceright has a presence. Using the hybrid model, Cisco has been able to cut its $120m talent acquisition spend in half.
  • Mark Hamberlin, VP HR Global Staffing, Cisco
  • Rebecca Callahan, President RPO, Randstad Sourceright
• Ericsson Outsources Global Payroll in Manila:Ericsson issued a RFI to 25 vendors, then created a short-list of 5, and ultimately selected Talent2. Managed payroll services provided by Talent2 for Ericsson in Southeast Asia and Oceania include 4,500 employees in 12 countries, which prior to outsourcing had 12 different payroll processes. Manila is the shared service center. Major benefits obtained by Ericsson thus far include: reduced risk management, minimized complexity of dealing with local tax laws, and ease of expanding into new countries.
  • Mark Howes, HR Director Asia Pacific, Ericsson
  • Mary Sue Rogers, Global Managing Director, HR Managed Services, Talent2
• Whirlpool Leverages RPO to Transform Talent Acquisition:Pre-RPO recruitment was decentralized and lacked consistency and methodology in its sourcing approach. Business partners were also spending a lot of time doing transactional work including screening and reviewing resumes. Kenexa’s RPO services include: sourcing, screening, administration, candidate management, creation of employment value proposition, and management of the candidate experience primarily in North America with some testing in Europe. KPI’s include: time to fill, quality of the candidate slate, diversity slate, and end-user satisfaction.
  • Lynanne Kunkel, VP of HR, Whirlpool North America
  • Rudy Karsan, CEO, Kenexa

Here are highlights from my RPO meetings:

• Pinstripe and Ochre House: Pinstripe has won 12 new RPO contracts YTD and its partner Ochre House continues to win new contracts in EMEA including North Africa and the Middle East as a result of its acquisitions of TAAHEED and Carmichael Fisher in early 2012.
• ManpowerGroup Solutions: New contract wins YTD include 40+ RPO deals globally in 20 countries. It has also expanded existing clients into new geographies including a U.S.-headquartered firm that expanded into China and Southeast Asia and a Spanish-headquartered firm that expanded throughout Europe and Latin America.
• Randstad Sourceright: Currently with ~100 RPO clients, it won 18 new contracts YTD. Four of its new wins are global deals as a result of the merger of Randstad and SFN Group, which was completed in September 2011. Its fastest growth has been in the mid-market.
• The RightThing, an ADP Company: Total RPO client count is at 80+. YTD wins include several enterprise and mid-market clients with ~50% as new clients and ~50% as existing ADP clients that added RPO services.
• WilsonHCG: Primarily serving large and mid-size clients, WilsonHCG also has small clients with <500 employees. The company has a 94% satisfaction rating with candidates and hiring managers across clients.

Stay tuned for my next blog where I will discuss additional meetings I had with Patersons, IBM, Hogan Assessments, SHL Assessments, Secova, ADP, Equifax Workforce Solutions, HireVue, and JobVite.

In the meantime, NelsonHall just published its fourth global RPO market analysis.

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RPO, A Bright Future on the Path to Business Impact

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

The future of RPO is bright with growth opportunities in every area of the world. According to NelsonHall’s “HRO Market Forecast 2012 – 2013,” RPO will remain the fastest growing area within HRO.

RPO is still evolving as a service line, moving from back-office paperwork administration to the front lines of recruiting, predictive assessment, and employer brand management. Contract renewals and extensions are now a regular part of the RPO news stream. Among those with announcements of renewals and extensions are:

• Alexander Mann Services
• Capita
• Manpower Group
• Novotus
• Pinstripe.

RPO is not for the faint of heart

With great opportunity comes increased risk. Growth is seldom in a straight path upwards and RPO is also on the leading edge of any business downturn that impacts hiring. It is not uncommon to see up and down swings in revenues of 20% or more between good and bad years. RPO providers need to be ready to rock and roll incredibly fast and be flexible in responding to changes in demand while balancing its own core of subject matter expertise.

RPO is the trail blazer

It is hard for any business including HRO service lines to keep up with new technologies, global service delivery networks, social media, and open device access. To recruit highly skilled multi-generational talent anywhere on the planet, RPO needs the latest tools and technologies to bring capabilities to employers they could not easily and affordably duplicate.

RPO has a direct path to business impact

Dr. John Sullivan, a respected HR thought leader, recently said that RPO has the greatest business impact of any HR function. Dr. Sullivan is referring to The Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) “Realizing the Value of People Management from Capability to Profitability” research that rates the relative business impact of different HR functions on growth and profitability.

This was a major study of over 4,000 respondents across 102 countries, comparing the difference in revenue growth and profit margins at firms with “very high capability” individual HR functions to the business impacts of “low capability” HR functions. The firms studied had been named to Fortune’s “100 Best Places to Work For” list at least three times in the last ten years; their stock price growth was then compared to the stock price growth of the S&P 500. The “best companies” with great HR saw their stock price increase an average of 109% when the S&P 500 rose only 10% over the last 10 years, up to 10 times higher. Wow!

BCG found that the top ten performing HR functions in rank order were:

• Recruiting
• Onboarding and retention
• Managing talent
• Employer branding
• Performance management and rewards
• Leadership development
• Mastering HR process
• Global people management and global expansion
• Enhancing employee engagement
• Providing HR shared services and outsourcing.

In addition to the good news for RPO, the broader picture is the need for integrated talent management and the boost for HR outsourcing. Great HR can and does directly support great business results, and great RPO and HRO can be a part of that success story.

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HRO Today Forum In Vogue

I found my attendance at last week’s HRO Today Forum to be very worthwhile. I presented my newly published research on the “State of the Learning BPO Marketplace,” including the emergence of social learning. While there, I took full advantage of attending many of the other sessions and meeting with several companies including: The Good Jobs, KellyOCG, Pinstripe, Randstad Sourceright, Kenexa, Aon Hewitt, Raytheon Professional Services, NorthgateArinso, Seven Step Recruitment, and Hays. Here are some of the highlights from the forum.

The Good Jobs: The Good Jobs is an online service that allows job seekers and employers an innovative way to find each other. Employers not only advertise job opportunities, but also their employment brand, culture, and corporate values to candidates. Job seekers can identify their life and work style priorities, and target those employers who meet their needs. Matching talent desired to employer desired will lead to employee engagement and retention in addition to business results, including increased productivity and lower cost by reduced attrition. No surprise The Good Jobs won the iTalent competition.

Where do Jobs Come From Panel: This panel was led by Prudential HR SVP Sharon Taylor and included Brink Lindsey from the Kauffman Foundation; Scott Case, CEO of Startup America; and John Haltiwanger from the University of Maryland. A few interesting data points from this session included the following:

• 90% of companies are small, but 65% of employees work for large companies
• 2003 – 2007 saw high job growth averaging 200,000 hires per month but it was not as strong as the 1990s
• From ~1977 – 2003, there were only 5 years that job growth exceeded layoffs for non-start-up companies, i.e. a net creation in jobs
• I missed the time period, but the point was that more jobs have been created in startups (3.5m) vs. established private sector companies (2.5m)
• The fastest growing businesses are also the most profitable.

Is Outsourcing Good for America Debate: Interesting points from the pro side included:

• 90% of outsourcing serves companies outside of the U.S.
• 95% of world consumers are outside of the U.S.
• 90% of what is made abroad gets sold abroad
• Foreign companies invest more in the U.S. (e.g. Honda, Nissan, BMW) than the U.S. invests abroad (it’s a 2 way street)
• The U.S. tax rate is one of the highest in the world adding to why some companies shift a portion of their business and jobs offshore.

Congratulations to all Bakers Dozen MSP winners led by Randstad Sourceright, Staff Management, Allegis Group Services, Adecco Solutions Group, The Bartech Group, Guidant Group, Advantage xPO, KellyOCG, Hyphen, Agile 1, Yoh, Hays Plc, and WorkforceLogic.

Congratulations to HRO Award recipients including providers NorthgateArinso, Pinstripe, Aon Hewitt, KellyOCG, and Evolv, Inc.; provider executives Cynthia Crose of IBM and Mike Ettling of NorthgateArinso; and buyer executive Chris Payton of Bank of America.

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

Interested in reading the latest HRO news from NelsonHall? Subscribe to our newsletter by emailing amy.gurchensky@nelson-hall.com with “HRO Insight” as the subject.

Oracle Buying Taleo: Is It a Good Deal?

As Howie Mandel always says to his guests after they’ve pressed the button and say “Deal!” on the TV show Deal or No Deal—”but was it a good deal?” Time will of course tell, but I do believe Oracle has made a very good deal. As the acquisition was announced just last February 9, I’ll briefly recap what had happened.

Oracle announced an agreement to buy Taleo for $46 per share, an 18% premium over Taleo’s stock price the day before the announcement, equating to $1.9 billion. As Taleo’s board has approved the acquisition, it is now subject to normal regulatory approval and is expected to close by summer. This follows SAP’s announcement on December 3, 2011 to acquire SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion. I had blogged about my take on the acquisition last December 13, 2011, stating that SuccessFactors is a provider of talent management software, but software alone does not get at the core of what makes for effective talent management. First, let me state that I also feel that SAP buying SuccessFactors was a good deal, albeit a steep price, as cloud-based software, including talent management is clearly on the rise and expected to continue to grow. NelsonHall has seen a large increase in the number of cloud SaaS HR services contracts and nearly 15% of HRO contracts in 2011 also included talent management software, often performance management, mostly in the mid-market.

Getting back to Oracle, Taleo provides cloud-based talent management software as well, so this is also a good deal, but how does that make this different? Because Taleo adds recruitment capability that Oracle did not have before. And although SuccessFactors provides recruitment software as does Taleo, Taleo also has an applicant tracking system that according to NelsonHall’s 2011 RPO report is the most widely used recruitment technology and applicant tracking system, utilized by approximately 80% of all RPO vendors for their clients, Oracle’s PeopleSoft had been in sixth place. The RPO report also noted that approximately 45% of all recruitment technology was platform-based. Taleo also has a business edition, popular in the mid-market for clients seeking a more standardized solution, used by vendors including Alexander Mann Solutions and Pinstripe. According to NelsonHall’s HRO forecast, RPO will have the highest growth of all HR services through the forecast period of 2015.

In summary, I think both acquisitions by SAP and Oracle are good; especially as clients continue to focus on talent management and recognize the need to have integrated technology and processes, most importantly supported by leadership that understand this. I’m in the final stages of my learning BPO research interviews and I‘m seeing a clear trend that learning vendors are now also providing talent management software and associated consulting services to their clients along with their learning services. I look forward to aggregating this data that I’ll present at the HRO Today Forum in Washington, DC on May 1st, titled State of the Learning BPO Marketplace, including the Emergence of Social Learning.

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

Interested in reading the latest HRO news from NelsonHall? Subscribe to our newsletter by emailing amy.gurchensky@nelson-hall.com with “HRO Insight” as the subject.

U.S. Jobs Grow – How Will It Impact HRO

By now, most have heard last Friday’s favorable jobs news.

In the U.S., 243,000 jobs were added in January, bringing the unemployment rate down to 8.3%, and as noted on one of the staffing provider’s earnings calls last week, down to 4.2% for college graduates. Government jobs have contracted as expected, while the private sector had the gains in the services industry, specifically in leisure, hospitality, education, healthcare, and retail, and in manufacturing, including construction.

Also last February 3, Randstad reported a five-point rise in its U.S. Employee Confidence Index.  The index measures the workers’ confidence in their personal employment situation and optimism in the economic environment. This is the biggest increase since the survey started seven years ago.

With good reason to be optimistic, many RPO providers are realizing the gains with increased hiring volumes by existing clients. Even before this welcome employment news, 2011 had been a good year for HRO. In RPO, many vendors achieved significant growth, including Kelly OCG, whose RPO revenue was up 40% year-over-year from 2010; Pinstripe was up 58% y-o-y with 21 new contracts and extensions; and for Q4, Kenexa reported an RPO growth of 54% y-o-y.

But the benefits go far beyond RPO. Increased hiring bodes well for providers of payroll, benefits, and learning as the number of employees they serve increases. For example, ADP, who already pays 1 of 6 U.S. employees, announced the number of employees on its U.S. client payroll increased by 2.8% in fiscal Q2 2012, for the period ending December 31, 2011. Benefits administration providers including Aon Hewitt, Fidelity, and Mercer reported numerous contract awards in 2011. In MPHRO, in North America, ADP won several new contracts, while IBM was awarded a large MPHRO contract with Air Canada and NorthgateArinso awarded a seven-year MPHRO renewal by Fifth Third Bank. In learning, vendors including Raytheon, Xerox, and Accenture won several contracts. There are more updates to follow on learning as NelsonHall is currently conducting a global learning BPO market analysis.

However, a few words of caution by ManpowerGroup were given last February 3 that demand is expected to continue to fluctuate and it would be prudent for employers to adopt flexible workforce models that include: full-time, contingent, and virtual-skilled workers to ensure productivity.

There are a few key implications here:

• Providers who haven’t yet provided recruitment services that include RPO, MSP, and Contingent Workforce services would be prudent to evaluate doing so and/or consider partnering with a vendor that does
• Given the ManpowerGroup statistic that 52% of U.S. companies are struggling to fill key jobs, focus on the development and retention of talent is more paramount than ever. Buy-side organizations should be continuously monitoring employee satisfaction, reviewing attrition rates, conducting exit interviews to find out why people leave, and developing action plans to improve organizational effectiveness. If buyers do not have this capability, they may want to consider a talent management vendor who can help them, which has become a key HRO vendor focus and for good reason!

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

Interested in reading the latest HRO news from NelsonHall? Subscribe to our newsletter by emailing amy.gurchensky@nelson-hall.com with “HRO Insight” as the subject.

RPO Continues Its Stride in Q2 2011

If you didn’t pay attention to the news and only looked at the recent financial results reported by staffing and RPO providers, you’d think that everything is fine with the global economy.  Let’s take a look at a few of the highlights including year-over-year revenue growth in Q2 2011 compared to Q2 2010 and some numbers of contracts awarded:

• Talent2 (fiscal year 2011 for period ending June 30) +26%, RPO +57%
• Kelly Services +16%, KellyOCG + 22.5%, and RPO ~+50%
• Kenexa +59%, RPO + 45%
• Manpower + 24%, ManpowerGroup Solutions +21% with 37 RPO deals closed in Q1 and 31 new RPO contracts awarded in Q2
• Pinstripe won or extended 15 RPO contracts in H1 (revenue not reported)
• SeatonCorp +20%, PeopleScout +95% with 9 new RPO contracts signed.

Why was growth and the number of contracts awarded so high when the sad reality of the news headlines is that there are debt problems, slowdown in GDP growth, and a continually high unemployment rate?   Well, that is precisely why!  There are several reasons including:

• Organizations who have had to downsize are turning to RPO because they don’t want to invest in hiring recruiters and associated staff only to potentially downsize again (i.e., it’s better to outsource recruitment to a vendor that can provide variable pricing and who can scale up or down quicker than the client)
• Obtaining  better quality of candidates and quality of hire from an outsourcing specialist
• Allowing HR to work as a strategic partner and in-conjunction with the RPO vendor to engage employees and retain talent (instead of focusing on hiring)
• Wanting to get out of the technology management business, which isn’t usually a client’s core competency
• Reducing time to hire, improving hiring manager satisfaction, etc.

In addition to revenue growth from new contracts and renewals, growth comes from existing clients that have increased their hiring volumes. Other sources of growth are from contracts won in prior quarters that take several months before fully ramping up.

RPO does not look like it is going to slow down anytime soon.  In NelsonHall’s HR Outsourcing Confidence Index, published in June, pipeline growth reported in the prior quarter was higher for RPO than all of the other HRO services.

At NelsonHall, we’ve seen an increase from buyers wanting to know who we see as the leading RPO providers by country and region. Buyers, are you evaluating outsourcing recruitment, if you haven’t done so already?

Gary Bragar,  HR Outsourcing Research Director, NelsonHall

HRO Confidence Continues to Soar!

Our recently published Q2 2011 HRO Confidence Index indicates that 50% of HRO suppliers, which includes payroll, RPO, learning, benefits, and MPHRO vendors, are much more confident in the HR Outsourcing business over the next twelve months compared to the previous twelve month period.  Thirty-five percent are slightly more confident and 15% are as confident.  The driving factors are two-fold.  The top reason is new contract activity, first reported as the main reason in Q3 2010, and the other reason is increased scope of existing contracts.

In the past, my colleague Linda Merritt and I have written about new contract awards. For this blog, I wanted to focus on the importance of contract renewals, including increases in scope expansions as they are closely following new contract activity as the reason for this high confidence in HRO!

A few examples of recent contract renewals and scope expansions include the following:

• Last week, Genpact was awarded a 7 year MPHRO contact by Nissan to include payroll, recruiting, training, and benefits administration.  Genpact had been providing HR services to Nissan group companies and affiliates.  It has also been providing services outside of HR that included F&A, procurement, collections, customer service, and analytics.  As part of the contract, Genpact acquired Nissan’s HR shared service center in Yokohama, Japan, which handles HR functions for 54,000+ employees globally. The center, renamed Genpact Japan Service Co., Ltd., will serve Nissan, its affiliates, and other Genpact clients.
• In June, NorthgateArinso was awarded a 7 year MPHRO renewal and scope expansion by Fifth Third Bank that I wrote about in my blog on the 23rd.
• In June, Pinstripe was awarded two RPO contract extensions and scope expansions by Johns Manville and Rayonier. For Rayonier, the scope was expanded  from professional hires for one division to include all professional and hourly hiring for all divisions.
  • In April, Aon Hewitt was awarded a flexible benefits contract by Emap, a business-to-business media group in the U.K.  Aon’s Risk Solutions business had already been providng services to Emap.
  • In addition to winning a total retirement outsourcing (TRO) renewal earlier this year with BP America, Fidelity Investments also won a  5 year contract renewal for TRO in North America by HP, adding 162,500 participants from EDS who were previously serviced by other providers.

I believe we will of course continue to see contract renwals, but within the next one to three years, we will see an even larger increase in scope expansions.  Why?  Although buyers are increasing their propensity to outsource, since the recession began in 2008 we’ve seen new HRO buyers treading more lightly to test the waters before diving more deeply.  A common example I see is in recruiting, where a new contract may start out for a particular business unit or geography, but then expand based on client satisfaction and increased benefits to enterprise-wide RPO, similar to the Pinstripe example above. When these contracts come up for renewal and the clients are happy, having  obtained the benefits they signed up for and maybe even had their expectations exceeded, then there’s a good chance these clients will be looking to increase whatever scope they can.

We’ll come back to additional findings and trends in our HRO Confidence Index in a future blog, but in the meantime , NelsonHall clients can view the full report at the NelsonHall website.

Gary Bragar,  HR Outsourcing Research Director, NelsonHall

Customer Service More Important than Ever – Even for HRO

Spherion recently released its new customer service survey results conducted by Monster.  Results show that nearly three quarters of consumers make a purchasing decision based on customer service, second only to quality and price.  That’s huge!  As a former quality trainer and college adjunct, I’ve been studying customer service for quite some time.  According to prior research by TARP, Technical Assistance Research Program, the figure was close to two-thirds, which indicates that the demand for better customer service has gotten even stronger.

Consumers are fed up with the lack of good customer service and thanks to more service provider competition, buyers don’t have to put up with bad service.  Consumers can simply go elsewhere.  Granted when it comes to HRO, the switch is not as easy, since it cannot be done by each individual client employee, but collectively, they can make their voices heard through internal communications that the provider may not be aware of immediately (which is why SLA’s alone don’t always tell the whole story).  Here are just a few things HRO service providers should do to keep clients happy at the individual participant level; otherwise this would be a white paper, not a blog!

• Ensure polite, courteous, and responsive service representatives in everything you do, e.g. Are you as responsive with a tier 2 inquiry or problem that needs the help of an SME as you are tier 1?
• Be easily accessible, e.g. when providing an 800 number for clients for particular service questions, if there are several prompts that must be selected, why not include the prompts to select in the original communication.  Test your own IVR as a user.
• Have user-friendly technology.  For websites that may be infrequently used, e.g. checking pension cash balance or 401(k), is there an easy way to check and reset passwords for users that can’t remember?  Are you providing simple instructions for infrequent transactions, e.g. annual enrollment?  Also, web information changes over time, so periodically check for broken links and user friendliness.

In my current RPO market research study, a track record of delivering quality customer service, including obtaining client references, is one of the top vendor selection criteria, as it was in my recently published learning BPO study.  The Spherion survey is a reminder that customers will not be shy about sharing bad experiences.  It’s best to be certain you know how your client’s employees really feel.

The good news is that HRO providers are, for the most part, providing a high level of service.  For example, SourceRight Solutions, SFN Group’s RPO unit, was the top enterprise RPO provider in HRO Today’s 2010 RPO Bakers Dozen and it was rated number one in quality of services by provider clients.  SourceRight Solutions was also only one of four companies to increase the satisfaction of existing customers while growing its customer base (the others included Kenexa, Pinstripe and AMS).  I tip my hat to SFN Group for conducting the survey and for walking the talk!

Gary Bragar, Lead HRO Analyst, NelsonHall