How supplier engagement leads to better response rates

One of the most common questions our Implementation Team receives from customers is, “How do I get a high response rate?” This is top of mind for our customers, so much so that we held roundtable discussions on this topic during our Summit on Responsible Supply Chains.

Engaging your suppliers early in the process and preparing them for success is crucial to aligning expectations, establishing trust and collaboration, and increasing supplier response rates. Here are some best practice approaches that can lead you to achieve higher response rates and receive more complete information from suppliers.

Alignment

Establish internal company and supplier alignment.

Before embarking on supplier assessments, it is essential to establish internal company and supplier alignment and have the infrastructure firmly in place to manage suppliers’ responsible sourcing performance.

Engage with your sourcing teams to ensure that they are fully committed and aligned with your Company’s sustainability goals. They should embrace the company’s sustainability mission and understand how their suppliers’ support will help move the company forward on its journey. Change management is a key part of this process.
Prepare them to communicate responsible sourcing requirements, answer their suppliers’ questions, and give actionable feedback to drive continual improvement. This will help you to recognize new opportunities for broader collaborations that will benefit both your company and the supplier’s.
Hold supplier forums and presentations about the company’s responsible sourcing policy, vision, goals, commitments, and accomplishments. Demonstrate, with your suppliers’ help, that you are doing some great work and making progress, and how they will also benefit in the long-term.

Engagement

Prepare your internal teams and suppliers for the survey.

Notify your internal sourcing teams, other stakeholders, and your suppliers so they are ready for the survey process before you send. Preparing your suppliers, internal sourcing teams, and other stakeholders for your survey will have the most significant impact on the information you can collect.

Send communications from your internal senior management to your suppliers, outside of SupplyShift, with a copy to your sourcing team that communicates why the assessment is important to your company, why you are making this request, and how you plan to use the information.
- Determine who will sign the pre-send communication, and how and when it will be sent to suppliers. Allow time for this process as often large companies have a Corporate Communications Team that is involved in writing and sending external communications, which can take longer than expected.

Ensure suppliers understand:
- They will receive an invitation email from you, via the SupplyShift platform.
- The type of data you’re expecting them to provide.
- The timeframe in which they’re expected to report their data.
Conduct trainings and/or provide FAQs for sourcing teams or others that will be contacted by suppliers with questions about the survey.
Hold supplier webinars to answer questions about the survey and give a demonstration of SupplyShift to raise suppliers’ confidence in using the system.
Some customers have opted to send a pre-assessment from SupplyShift. This allowed suppliers to verify receipt of the invitation email, set-up their accounts, practice submitting a survey, and overcome other technical start-up issues. Customers also confirmed supplier contacts were correct and email addresses were valid and made corrections in advance of the full survey roll-out.

Accountability & Follow-Up

Hold suppliers accountable for responding.

Suppliers must manage demands for data from numerous sources. Make sure that they are ready to prioritize your request, are willing to respond when it is received, and hold suppliers accountable for non-responsiveness.

Incorporate responsible sourcing KPIs in suppliers’ annual performance reviews and rankings and measure changes to supplier performance over time.
Include requirements to respond to sustainability requests for data, or onsite audits in supplier agreements and KPIs. This is typically tied to meeting the company’s Supplier Code of Conduct or other equivalent social and environmental responsibility requirements along with the expectation of continual improvement.
Establish a plan of action and response for when suppliers do not reply or refuse to participate without a good explanation or ability to demonstrate an equivalent commitment or policies.
Send reminders on a regular schedule during the response period, either in-app via SupplyShift and/or directly from your internal teams.
Identify a subset of key suppliers from the entire group that must respond to the assessment, based on spend coverage, sole sourced, or other important criteria, to assure you have a good baseline of data for robust analysis and reporting.

On the SupplyShift platform, use the response tracker to view the status of suppliers’ progress and submissions. You can selectively send reminders to any subset of suppliers, or to individual suppliers with customized email messages. If you have many suppliers and few internal resources to handle the follow-up, consider contracting with SupplyShift or an external partner to email suppliers or call them to encourage responses.

Feedback

Provide results to and get feedback from suppliers.

The best way to get the ball rolling with supplier improvement is to publish and share the results of the assessment and ratings with your sourcing teams and suppliers.

Use the Publish feature to share anonymized results to suppliers through SupplyShift so they can see how they rank against their peers.
Provide a list of opportunities and recommended improvements for each supplier. This provides targeted talking points that your internal sourcing team can use to increase collaboration and partnerships with suppliers that are doing great in an area of focus for your company.
Establish goals and metrics with corresponding action plans for suppliers that can improve in the future.
Get feedback from suppliers about their satisfaction with the process, assessment content, and what they feel can be improved for next time.

Consistency

Repeat the survey process.

Consistency is key to scaling sustainability within your supply chain. Staying consistent will ensure you have a successful response period each time as the suppliers will know what to expect and start to anticipate the upcoming request.

Repeat the survey sending process on a regular basis and around the same time each year. Remind suppliers when it is that time of the year to report and follow through with the same process.
Try to make minimal changes so suppliers don’t feel like you are expecting more out of them each reporting period.

Consistent and complete responses year after year are the most effective ways to make major progress on your company’s sustainability goals and commitments. And now, you are well on your way!