At our first SuccessConnect of the year in Las Vegas, I invited Accenture and Corning to join me on stage to talk about HR transformation at their companies. The digitalization of HR requires managing change, and expectations, and the best way to understand what is takes to succeed on this journey is hearing directly from leaders in the midst of it. These are two very different businesses, but they have in common a vision to put their people at the center of everything they do.
Corning, maker of the first light bulb for Thomas Edison, wants to attract their industry’s most innovative minds and provide an employee experience centered on excellence and collaboration. For Accenture, our longstanding partner and now a full suite customer taking our solutions to its 400,000 employees globally, agility in business is as important as allowing people to find the opportunities to do their best work. Both Accenture and Corning have a clear vision of their expected outcomes, and they spoke about needing not just the right software, but also getting the journey right. If you missed it, our conversation at SuccessConnect can be found online - keynote replay.
One of the promises we bring to our clients is that we are here to take a journey with them. And that journey just starts at the deal signing. I talked at SuccessConnect about the importance of self-sufficiency and adoption. Both require providing an experience that is easy and engaging. I tell our team that success is when someone uses our solutions and thinks “that’s pretty awesome.”
Two years ago, I made my first set of customer commitments at SuccessConnect, and since then, we’ve invested equally in both the S’s in SaaS – the software and the service, because our clients are investing in both. This is the world of multi-tenant services, and we’re taking the DNA of rapid innovation cycles from product development to everything – product support, solution implementation, and next gen cloud operations – to ensure you’re successful in your continuous transformation journey.
2016 Customer Commitments
Keeping with my SuccessConnect tradition, here is what I promised customers this year:
Value realization
One of the things that separates SuccessFactors from our competitors is the recognition that we’re not in the business of simply transacting software, we’re in the business of delivering your ability to create outcomes – and foremost among those is an all-in team, motivated by your vision and ready to do what they are best at to drive your business ahead. To make sure you can measure the value we bring, we’re providing you a tool to track your progress on specific outcomes, and quantify success with our solutions. We’ll soon introduce a beta version, with the live tool launching at SuccessConnect 2017.
Customer support
Everyone on my team, no matter what role they’re in, understands the need to be committed 110% to customer support. And we know you expect support to happen quickly, so we are ramping up our team to ensure a two-day turnaround on 80% of support tickets that don’t involve code fixes or engineering. Over the next few months, you will also see new customer service features such as live chat for product support and a more personalized experience on our Customer Community, with content relevant to where you are in your journey filtered for you.
Implementation success
As I emphasized at SuccessConnect, the HR transformation journey is a three-team partnership between you, our client, your partner and our team. The days of sitting down and blueprinting your journey over months and years are gone. To ensure your successful adoption of SuccessFactors solutions, we’re introducing programs to help our implementation partners ensure you are live on time, and ensure our software is configured for best practices, and results. Implementations will include tollgates for quality checks, and support for partners with timely expertise on any challenges. We will also launch a project evaluation system to give real-time visibility into project progress.
Innovation with stability
Another important commitment for us is to balance speed in innovation with ensuring stability of our solutions globally. In 2015, we introduced separate preview and production release environments for all clients. The value of this has been far beyond what we expected, with customer preview logins to test features increasing exponentially for each release. Evolving our release model further, in 2017 we’ll focus two releases a year on foundational changes for platform, scale and stability, and two releases focused on pure innovation including opt-in features. The releases with foundational changes will be made in Q2 and Q3, to avoid peak usage months, and to ensure you do not have to spend time testing new functionality during your most critical business period.
We’ll continue the success is simply human conversation at several more SuccessConnect events coming up in Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore and Vienna. And we’ll be back in Las Vegas soon for SuccessConnect 2017 from April 3-5. I invite you to pre-register to join us there.
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