By Elliot H. Clark
CEO, HRO Today
I want to congratulate Pontoon, the 2015 MSP Baker’s Dozen industry leader, for an excellent survey year and every provider who made the 2015 HRO Today MSP Baker’s Dozen Customer Satisfaction Ratings list. Pontoon dominated in both size and service, and their team is clearly doing a great job on some of the most challenging global programs.
Methodology Changes
Each year, we review and evolve the various HRO Today Baker’s Dozen Customer Satisfaction surveys. We do this based on advice from practitioners and providers about the changing nature of the services and technologies they use or offer. After five years of data, we have changed the weightings methodology of the MSP Baker’s Dozen. Quality of service is still paramount, followed by breadth of service, then size of deal. What we have changed is the quality of service score itself.
As the MSP industry has evolved and deals have grown in size and complexity, it was critical to create accelerators for these two factors. When a provider is managing a program with thousands of workers across many countries, it is far more difficult to earn a high quality of service score than it is for managing a few hundred in a single location. The calculation weighting for size and complexity is very similar to how we approach the RPO Baker’s Dozen, which takes these dimensions into consideration. The quality of service score you see in the magazine is adjusted on whether a given deal exceeds the statistical mean of the market for size or complexity -or both. We believe this gives a more realistic view of the ability to perform the larger deals in this marketplace.
Disrespected and Disqualified
A provider that has previously listed on the MSP Baker’s Dozen was disqualified this year. We uncovered irregularities in their responses. When we find these kinds of issues -thankfully very rarely -we feel disrespected and so should all of the practitioners who use the results. We believe most providers and their employees are honorable, but we take precautions by doing IP tracing and also verifying e-mail addresses.
This company had responses purportedly from two different companies from the same computer. Three of their responses came back as invalid e-mail addresses. In addition, we found one of the responses from last year came from the same suspicious IP address used this year. Clearly, all of these surveys were invalid. In addition, as we explain every year in the methodology disclosure and our video presentation, we reject surveys “that are too perfect to be believed or ones so bad as to be vengeful.” In the case of this provider, every one of their survey responses was identical and also perfect. The whole sample was thrown out and the provider was notified that they have been disqualified.
HRO Today magazine is committed to offering their readers the best customer satisfaction survey process. We understand that picking a provider is a critical decision over which careers can be damaged if a wrong choice is made. We take our responsibility for accuracy very seriously, and when we encounter anything that threatens the integrity of the process, we address it, up to barring a company from the survey process itself.
Thanks again to the 250-plus HR and procurement professionals who took part in this year’s survey, and we hope you find the results useful in your upcoming RFP season. We know you participate as a way to offer confidential feedback to your colleagues at other organizations about your experiences. We encourage anyone who is concerned about the process to please contact us at researchsxp@sharedxpertise.com.
If you are conducting an RFP and would like support, please contact our Baker’s Dozen authorized consulting partner at www.highermetrix.com.
