At Workday Rising Europe 2015 in Dublin, we'll gather with our European customers to celebrate the successes we've achieved together. Chano Fernandez, president EMEA, discusses the growth of Workday's European community, and why it's imperative Workday runs its business with a customer-led ethos.
In a few weeks we launch registration for Workday Rising Europe, which takes place early December in Dublin. I’m very excited for our second year of this conference where we collaborate and celebrate with European customers, and expect a great turnout given our strong growth in the region. While I think there are a number of reasons for our fast growing community, if I had to put one above all others it’s this: we put customers first.
Customers in Europe often tell me that during the process of vetting Workday they were impressed by the unusually high levels of satisfaction they heard from our other customers, as well as the customer-centric culture they experienced in interactions with Workday people.
Workday was born in the cloud, and this engenders a fundamentally different approach to customers than old world technology companies. Why? Because at our core we are a software and services company—we do not simply sell a license and then move on to the next sale. We must go beyond delivering the highest levels of security and the best technology innovations. Our business depends on subscriptions and renewals, and it’s imperative we run it with a customer-led ethos.
In fact, when people talk about the cloud being a disruptive technology and game changer, I would argue this is more than just an evolution in how technology is designed, delivered, and used. It’s also about the disruption and change the cloud brings to the whole technology industry business model and approach.
Our 97% customer satisfaction rating comes from continuing to ensure that from initial deployment through feature updates, clear action plans are in place to navigate any issues that customers may have.
At Workday, before an organisation decides to become a customer, we work with stakeholders to define the specific value benchmarks they want from any application deployment. This is not a sales technique. It’s a realistic evaluation of how our applications can align with their organisation, and forms the basis of a value realisation study and review that continues through the lifecycle of our relationship with the customer. It’s how we set expectations and make sure Workday and the customer have a common vision of success.
During the deployment of applications, we continue to work closely with the customer through our Delivery Assurance programme, which aims to ensure that the customer gets, through either Workday or our partners, a consistently high level of consultancy and delivery around the project.
Our customer focus does not end when deployments are complete. Our 97% customer satisfaction rating comes from hard work in continuing to ensure that from initial deployment through feature updates, clear action plans are in place to navigate any issues that customers may have.
Achieving high customer satisfaction isn’t an easy thing to do. We know that anything less than 100% isn’t perfect, and there’s more we can do to improve. Workday Rising Europe is a great opportunity to continue that conversation while we also celebrate the successes we have achieved together.
I look forward to seeing many of our customers in Dublin later this year.
What do customers think about Workday Rising Europe? Watch the highlights from last year’s event in London.
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