Helping Workday Customers Through Change

Welcome to Services Spotlight, a place in the Executive Insights newsletter where Workday’s services organization will share information about some of the things we do to ensure the best possible customer experiences.

In this issue, my colleagues discuss how they embrace change. Among the big changes all of our customers deal with are new enterprise software deployments. Having Workday in the cloud eliminates many of the challenges our customers faced with legacy applications, yet we realize that cloud deployments may bring about big changes for your organizations. I’d like to share with you some of our efforts to help make these changes happen as smoothly as possible.

We start to help customers think about change in the pre-deployment process, which includes showing how our applications can help them transform their businesses. It’s our goal that customers embrace new opportunities that our applications offer and not just recreate legacy processes in Workday.

During deployment, our Delivery Assurance service takes a holistic perspective on proposed changes and reviews plans for a customer’s adoption of Workday. This program includes checkpoints on the project progression and details regarding integrations and configurations. Your Delivery Assurance manager gathers information in meetings with your project leaders, and we also run reports on your company’s baseline configurations in Workday. We compare those results against best practices we’ve gathered from other customer deployments and then make recommendations as needed.

Of course change doesn’t end with deployments—your business needs are always changing, and the Workday system is designed to enable these business-led changes. In addition to being able to react quickly to changing market dynamics, our most successful customers have adopted an agile mindset around how to get the most out of Workday. For example, some have an active governance board that considers how new features delivered in Workday feature releases can address their evolving business needs. They’ve moved from the legacy mindset of having to wait years for a major, costly upgrade and have snapped into micro-project mode.

That’s where our Customer Success management team and its Annual Planning and Review sessions can be very helpful. During these meetings we reassess your objectives (such as the initial business case), delve into usage data (highlighting features you’re using and those you haven’t turned on), and discuss how your business has changed (including major events and internal initiatives). All of this information feeds a Feature Adoption Blueprint that we co-develop with you to help meet your most important objectives with Workday for the coming year.

And since we always want to learn how well we’ve served you through these application deployments and life in production, your feedback is critical. Our Go-Live Survey helps us better understand the deployment experience, and our annual Named Support Contact Survey provides insights into your experiences with Workday application performance, community, documentation, support, and other components.

Perhaps most important is our Executive Sponsor Survey that Workday Co-Founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri sends out to customer executive sponsors to gain a high-level assessment of every customer’s overall satisfaction level. Last year we achieved a 98% favorable rating from that survey, up from 97% the previous three years. The rating is a critical measure of our customers’ confidence in us, and the constructive comments you include in the survey make it an invaluable tool to drive improvements across Workday, including how we can better help customers manage change.

There can be no progress without change, and we’re grateful our customers have chosen Workday to deliver new innovations that help drive transformational changes at their organizations. We’ll continue to listen to you, and do all we can to make those changes as easy and positive as possible.