The Social Media Services BPO tool is available to NelsonHall clients at http://research.nelson-hall.com/ and is also available for a limited period free-of-charge to strategic sourcing managers.

The NEAT analyses themselves are based on a combination of vendor and client interviews. The vendors are scored against a wide range of criteria, establishing a number of scenarios, each with different weightings to represent a different business situation or client business need.

Suppliers of social media services covered by this NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) include Aegis, Capita, Dell, Firstsource, Genpact, HP Enterprise Services, Sitel, Wipro, WNS, and Xerox Services.

The tool covers a number of social media services business situations including organizations seeking to use social media services for revenue optimization, for customer experience enhancement, for market insight, as well as those organizations just seeking to understand the application of social media services to their organization and put a toe in the water.

To add further value in speeding up the sourcing process, clients are able to input their own weightings and tailor the tool to their requirements. So they might say: "This set of weightings for this business need looks about right to me but I want to place more emphasis here." This enables sourcing managers to use the service as an interactive tool via the web and tailor it to meet their own specific sourcing requirements.

The NEAT (NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment) tools for strategic sourcing managers are part of NelsonHall's "speed-to-source" initiative. The NEAT tool sits at the front-end of the vendor screening process and consists of a two-axis model: assessing vendors against their "ability to deliver immediate benefit" to buy-side organizations and their "ability to meet client future requirements". The latter axis is a pragmatic assessment of the vendor's ability to take clients on an innovation journey over the lifetime of their next contract. Accordingly, in line with NelsonHall's typically pragmatic approach, we're not focusing on vaporware or long-term visions. We're evaluating to what extent vendors can take clients on a journey of development over the life of the next contract.

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