Valuable 360 Reviews in 10 Countries, 3 Continents for Fidelity Marketing

As a marketing company specializing in customer loyalty, Fidelity Marketing knows what keeps people motivated. Fidelity Marketing doesn’t just want its clients to keep loyal customers; they want to keep loyal employees themselves, too. One of the tools they use to develop their personnel and assist them on their career paths is a 360 degree feedback review.

“Our main objective with 360 reviews is to measure everyone’s performance based on their competencies,” said Aída Mora, Process Analyst at Fidelity Marketing. “We want to identify both strengths and areas for improvement for everyone here.”

Meeting Specific Requirements

Fidelity had specific requirements for the technological tools they needed for managing the 360 review process. They wanted to send personalized forms to all participating employees, managers, and executives. They also wanted capabilities for capturing qualitative data.

They considered some Mexican-based providers before selecting Blue by Explorance.

“Blue makes it easy to create personalized questionnaires,” said Mora. “With Blue, we can create different forms for different people in the company, depending on their position. It’s easy to generate different forms for the different roles.”

Fidelity also appreciated the company’s responsiveness.

“Explorance responded quickly – their speedy response to our request for proposal gave us confidence.”

Flexible Forms

With Blue, Fidelity was able to create questionnaires that were both shorter and more detailed. The forms are shorter, because Blue can pull detailed demographic information directly from the firm’s data source, such as name or department to name a few. They are also more detailed, because respondents can provide more comments when needed.

“We have open-ended questions where respondents can provide detailed written responses,” said Mora. “In addition, if respondents pass a pre-determined threshold when they rate a subject’s behavior, a comment box opens up so they can provide comments as to why they rated this way.”

All of this data provides a robust and complete picture for managers to work with as they discuss an employee’s development plan.

“Reports were sent first to HR for review, who passed these on to managers with the appropriate instructions. Then managers met with their direct reports to review and discuss the results,” she said. “Executives reviewed results with HR Directors or other appropriate regional directors.”

Complete Reports

In addition to creating the forms they wanted, Fidelity created the reports they needed to display results.
“We wanted to make it easy to understand while providing sufficient detail for a helpful discussion,” she said.

“We like this kind of report very much, as it clearly points out strengths and areas for development.”

Aída Mora, Process Analyst at Fidelity Marketing

The first page shows the number of people who provided feedback, instructions on how to read the report, and a list of the competencies that were assessed.

The following pages show a frequency graph, which illustrates how the subject rated themselves, how others rated the subject, the company average, the department average, and the average for people holding the same position in different regions. These results were shown for every competency assessed.

“The report also shows ranking graphs, which show the top three and bottom three competencies, and the top three and bottom three behaviors within those,” Mora said. “We like this kind of report very much, as it clearly points out strengths and areas for development.”

“We are highly satisfied with the professional services we received from Explorance. They were very attentive to our needs, and responded quickly to our questions.”

Aída Mora, Process Analyst at Fidelity Marketing

Excellent Professional Services

Fidelity received full professional services from Explorance for their implementation and roll-out, which comprised requirements gathering (including report building), project management, testing, go-live, monitoring, training, and handover.

“We are highly satisfied with the professional services we received from Explorance,” she said. “They were very attentive to our needs, and responded quickly to our questions.”

Explorance gathered requirements for the project in September, ran some test cycles in November, then went live for the entire company in the second week of December.

“Ten countries, across Latin America and Spain, were involved for the project,” she said. “Everything went smoothly for the final launch.”

Positive Feedback From End-users

The company is getting positive feedback from participants regarding the 360 review.

“Initially, there was some hesitance about this initiative,” she said. “We took some time to explain that this was an assessment that measured competencies for development purposes only. Also, respondents were fully confident in the confidentiality of their responses.”

“After the review was completed, their opinion changed,” she said. “Many people congratulated us on this project.”

Outstanding Service

Fidelity is pleased that they received everything they needed in the languages they wanted.
“All our interaction with Explorance has been in Spanish, and we are completely satisfied with the languages provided for the user interface and the services we received,” she said.

The company also required a Portuguese interface for their Brazilian subsidiary, which Explorance provided in time for their launch.

“We first discussed a Brazilian Portuguese interface not long after implementation, and Explorance had it ready for us two months later when we launched the 360 review to the entire company,” said Mora. “We were impressed.”

Overall, the personalized forms, robust reports, and the comfort of knowing they could reach someone when they needed were the key factors of success. Fidelity Marketing is pleased with their new 360 review tool, and looking forward to doing even more with it.

“Explorance is 100% focused on their customer needs,” Mora concluded. “The Explorance staff understands their product really well, which makes it easy to solve any issues that arise. We enjoy working with Explorance and Blue for 360, and look forward to even better and stronger 360 reviews to make our company even more competitive.”