Organizations rightfully spend a lot of time and resources to conduct Voice of Customer surveys, primary and secondary market research to understand latent and unmet needs as well brand perception. No such process process or framework exists for understanding the perception of suppliers.
It is unfortunate because Suppliers increasingly play a central role in the design, production and delivery of products and services and their perception of how customers treat and work with suppliers can determine how they prioritize and support customers.
ZFlow includes an innovative Voice of Supplier survey that is quick to design, collect information from suppliers and analyze survey results to understand Suppliers’ perception of the company as a customer. Understanding the perception of suppliers provides supply chain teams an opportunity to improve supplier relationship as well as design appropriate supplier development activities.
Setting up Voice of Supplier Survey
Voice of Supplier Survey is fairly simple to set up and is based on 2 elements
Suppliers and Supplier Contacts
Suppliers and Supplier Contacts are the first element of Survey set up. Voice of Supplier survey is open and does not expect Supplier entities to be defined and available to run the survey. You can just import CSV or Excel files to create Suppliers and related contacts and these are defined only in the scope of the survey.
Voice of Supplier Survey Questions
The next step is to define survey questions and related answer definition. We highly recommend use of quantitative rating oriented questions so that when collected over reasonable number of supplier participants statistically relevant information can be be obtained.
Supplier Survey Response
Once the survey is set up you can publish the survey so that each of the supplier participants can login and answer the survey questions using a guest account and specific passcodes. There is no requirement to create or onboard supplier participants for this process.
Voice of Supplier Survey Report
Once the process is closed the survey is effectively closed for supplier responses. Survey process owners can then analyze survey results using the flexible survey report that is embedded in the workflow.
Summary
Voice of Supplier Survey is a simple yet effective workflow that Sourcing and Supplier Development teams can use to understand how Suppliers feel and their perception of the your organization as a customer. Information from the survey can be used to tune and improve supplier management strategy (can be different for different commodities and needs) and design appropriate Supplier Development activities.