CDP and CSR reporting season has barely passed before over-worked sustainability managers must turn their attention to customer sustainability surveys. While these can be resource-intensive, they also present opportunities to further your sustainability initiatives internally, elevate your brand’s standing with key customers, and stand out in the marketplace. Before survey season hits, you should start gathering relevant information and, more importantly, devise a plan to improve your performance.

Prioritizing Multiple Surveys

Most companies receive multiple customer surveys with Walmart’s Sustainability Index the most widely distributed, as well as needing to address rating frameworks such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, and others. While reviewing these various questionnaires for common opportunities to improve your score, you should also consider the requests from your most important customers.

Raising the profile of your brand with critical customers generally receives top-level support. While you have internal leaders’ attention, you can leverage relevant survey questions to generate support for key program initiatives within your company.

Pure Strategies’ research revealed that more than three-quarters of the 100 global companies we surveyed cited Walmart as the retailer responsible for pushing them to improve the sustainability of their products, followed by Target and Costco.

The Walmart Sustainability Index - Basics

With a goal of covering over 70% of the products in its U.S. stores, Walmart’s Sustainability Index is the most ambitious supplier survey initiative among retailers. Companies that will participate in the Index should be aware of the following:

• Timeframe: Walmart Sustainability Index survey period is October 3 – November 4, 2016. Note that registration with the SAP Product Stewardship Network is required. Be alert for Walmart emails with details.
• Walmart’s Sustainability Hub contains additional helpful information.

Here are some suggestions to get the most from this opportunity and improve your performance.

Understand your buyers’ priorities:

Have a conversation! Some buyers may not yet be fully engaged in sustainability, but others may be seeking improvement in particular areas. Understanding their priorities will help you determine where to focus your efforts.

Select a few short-term wins:

Review your answers on the previous surveys you completed and identify one or more key performance indicators (KPIs) where it will be relatively easy for you to improve your score. Questions concerning goal-setting, tracking, and sharing progress publicly may be the most manageable to implement in less than a year.

Target longer-term improvements aligned with your goals:

Addressing questions involving raw material transparency, product design, farmer/raw material processor best practices, and successfully reducing impacts may take more time but may yield deeper benefits and boost your internal goals as well. Don’t lose sight of these challenging questions and identify one or two areas to focus on over the next two years. Many retailer questionnaires provide links to resources that can help you begin to tackle the more challenging product hotspots.

Develop a data collection plan now:

Walmart’s five-week survey window is generally not long enough to collect relevant data. Establish a data collection plan as soon as possible. If you will need to collect data from your suppliers, give them enough time for this task and make sure to connect your request to your company’s sustainability priorities. They should understand this request reflects your company’s priorities as well as Walmart’s.

Pure Strategies Can Help

Your competitors are working hard to improve their performance; don’t lose the opportunity to boost your own program. Approximately 3,000 unique products made by companies identified as leaders in a category (such as televisions or plastic toys) through the Walmart Sustainability Index received the Sustainability Leaders badge on Walmart.com so that shoppers can easily find the companies that are working to improve their products’ social and environmental profiles. Aim for top-scoring recognition in your category to take full advantage of any benefits offered by your customers.

Pure Strategies’ team of experts can help you understand survey questions, develop improvement plans, gather data from your suppliers, build supplier capacity, and implement strategies to improve scores and achieve meaningful reductions in product impacts. To learn more, contact us at info@purestrategies.com.