You have just been awarded a talent staffing program with a new client. Congratulations to you and your sales team. What you do next will set your client’s perception of your ability to provide the solution they sought when adopting you into their contingent labor program.
This is where most firms falter. Sales celebrates the win and fails to engage delivery in preparing to execute upon the promises made during the sales process. How can a company provide focused results without initiating a client-specific service strategy? To design a successful service strategy, engage sales in the pre-delivery planning prior to award. Your sales team undoubtedly identified the client’s pain points. Do those pains include: access to resources, candidate diversity & inclusion, supplier responsiveness, or, typical performance shortfalls in; quality, time-to-fill, pricing, contractor care, communication, and/ or turnover?
Work with sales to create a scenario statement or mission statement documenting why the client selected you, and, the performance capabilities your sales team committed to. Capture as much detail as possible to provide a foundation for the transfer of client understandings. Here are some examples:
Scenario statement. ABC Company is seeking additional suppliers in support of a new product or service launch. The current supplier community does not demonstrate capacity to provide quality and/or quantity of candidates to meet talent forecasts, which, has senior management concerned.
Commitments. In our proposals, we acknowledged source channels and access to talent platforms not previously presented, including expanded worker designations, provide a Primary Point of Contact (POC) designated for meetings and attentive communication and introduction of innovative and consistent process improvement through application of advanced technologies.
PREMIUM CONTENT: U.S. Staffing Occupational Markets Guidebook 2021
To build an effective service plan you need to understand anticipated requisition flow, geographic coverage, acceptable worker designations and skill set requirements. Knowing volume of what and where will guide you in determining your cost effective staff count to be assigned in meeting the clients’ delivery expectations. Build and identify your client-dedicated delivery team of; account managers, recruiters, onboarding and employee care specialists, as well as accounting resources to manage the increased workload.
Document client-specific work instructions and train your delivery and back-office teams. Draft your client service plan, which is a living document, capturing the client’s business rules and preferences identified in your scenario statement. The document becomes your desktop work instruction for cross-training of account teams. The service plan needs to include; a client-specific communication plan and internal performance expectations and metrics.
Taking the time to create a comprehensive service plan will streamline your internal operations expediting your success and client satisfaction. I challenge you to pilot this strategy with an existing or new client engagement. You will be surprised with your team’s enthusiasm, focus and performance.