Keep remote eyes on your sub-contractors

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Keep remote eyes on your sub-contractors

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Do you know if sub-contractors are doing a great job for your customers?

If your business relies on 3rd parties, agents or sub-contractors to deliver service to your customers, how sure are you that they are delivering great service? They (and not you) are face-to-face with your customers, and you may be unaware of problems until it’s too late.

Given that “Brand Value” is determined by customer experience, your brand can be devalued if a sub-contractor does not deliver to the required standards.

Take, for example, a training company who sub-contracts training provision to independent tutors. The company’s reputation could be damaged if a tutor fails to deliver a great course.

How about an office services company who outsources cleaning to a 3rd party cleaning contractor? The whole annual service contract could be jeopardised by the poor performance of the sub-contractor’s cleaning staff.

Clearly, it’s essential for you to maintain quality control measurements on service performance. It’s equally importantly that you are seen to have a grip on day-to-day service quality.

A useful way to measure performance, and to spot negative trends, is to proactively monitor customer satisfaction using a short online survey. This becomes your contractor-independent measurement of service quality.

It’s even more useful if the surveys can capture positive feedback from departmental managers within the customer. When the annual contract is up for renewal, it’s more difficult for the buyer to justify a re-tender or squeeze your margin when you present a list of glowing reports from the departmental managers that the buyer is answerable to. A quality feedback process can easily be setup to measure service quality on an ongoing basis.

A proactive closed-loop process can help you maintain customer satisfaction – and could mean the difference between a contract renewal and a contract lost.