Using the established customer satisfaction methodology from CR Magazine’s last issue and adapted from CR Magazine’s sister publications, we identified the top players in the Environment and Energy Technology space, using data and feedback from customers.

By Elliot Clark

Ranking technologies in the CR domain is a new practice. In other technology segments, you have your Gartner Magic Quadrants and analyst reports galore. But in the very new field of Environment and Energy Technology, CR’s Top Ten ranking is the first customer-based ranking we know of.

With the debut this month of the Corporate Responsibility Best Practices survey, which CR completed in partnership with NYSE Euronext, we know that a large number of CR officers now have significant seven- and eight-figure budgets for services and technologies that help them reach their mandate. And the budget numbers are increasing quickly. Those more-sizable budgets have started to drive an ever-larger number of technology providers into the software business. And the rise in competition among providers will boost the complexity of the CR leader’s job to pick the right application for her/his firm in environment and energy.

As we mentioned in last issue’s Top Ten Ranking of PR and Communications firms, Corporate Responsibility Officers, or CROs, are at a point of evolution similar to where human resources leaders were prior to 1980. HR was then known as personnel, or in unionized companies, labor relations. The professional association was the American Society of Personnel Administrators, with barely 3,000 individual members. In 1989 the group changed its name to the Society for Human Resource Management or SHRM, a change that rapidly professionalized the practice of HR. Today SHRM is a 250,000-individual member group representing companies with an estimated aggregated budget of $200 billion. And by 2002, there were no reliable, independent, customer-based ratings of providers in the HR space.

So in that year, CR Magazine’s sister publications HRO Today and HRO Europe began ranking several categories of HR service and technology firms in what became known as the Baker’s Dozen Customer Satisfaction Ratings. These Baker’s Dozens (so-called because most of the lists involve 13 companies) have been based since 2007 on a highly successful customer satisfaction survey methodology. Practitioners in the HR field have actually produced our rankings in post-RFP bid meetings and based countless vendor selections on the rankings. HRO Today and HRO Europe’s satisfaction-driven approach has become the gold standard in HR vendor evaluation. So why introduce it in CR Magazine?

The CR profession and the CRO Association are much younger, with the CROA representing about 200 large-cap companies and 1,200 individuals. But with their rapidly-growing budgets and increasing reliance on vendors in technologies and professional services to meet their missions, vendor selection is becoming quite complex.

In response to the market need, CR Magazine has introduced these Top Ten Rankings, which will now increasingly be relied upon by practitioners to make vendor selections. In the Environment and Energy Technology Ranking, we surveyed more than nine firms, but only nine made the final list. Despite the fact that we’re one short of ten, we’ll retain the Top Ten Ranking name. By next year, the field will have expanded to meet its label.

Ranking Methodology: Current customers were asked both by their providers and CR Magazine to participate in a confidential online survey regarding their experience with their current provider (identities of respondents remain confidential to the providers). The survey instrument measures three dimensions. First is “breadth of service,” which is the subset of services provided. The second is “deal size,” a reflection of divisional or geographic reach or size of company. We only offer deal size as a comparator for you to measure a potential provider against the scope of a program you may wish to put out to bid.

The third component, and the most important, is “quality of service.” This is based on a series of questions that examined the performance, relations, and trust between provider and customer. We used a five-point Likert scale with answers ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Each answer was ascribed a point value, and the points were totaled, averaged, and the mean was calculated into the overall quality score. We then weighted each dimension for the “overall score.”

We allow providers to refer customers but neither customers nor providers know the weightings of questions nor the dimensional categories in the final index. We keep this information secret so known customers cannot be coached to focus on certain questions. We perform spot verification of respondents using two different methods. We also solicit respondents from our own list so the sample is not only generated by the provider referrals.

This is the respected and standard methodology used in all of our Baker’s Dozen customer satisfaction surveys. Once again, CR Magazine ranked only providers for which we were able to compile enough respondents to have statistically valid customer data.

We hope that CR Magazine’s Top Ten Rankings in Environmental and Energy Technology helps you identify the most appropriate partner for your needs.

Click here to view CR Magazine’s Top Ten Rankings in Environmental and Energy Technology.