Salesforce for HR - turning CRM inwards?
- Summary:
- Salesforce says it's turning CRM inwards to focus on employee engagement with a pragmatically re-positioned bundle of offerings.
Dennis recently commented on the pitch from Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd that customers and the workforce are two sides of the same coin. Dennis said:
That may sound like madness for those analysts who tend to bucket themselves as CRM or HCM experts but it is something I am convinced embodies the future of work and the future of customer experience.
Well, it would appear that it’s an idea that’s occurred to Salesforce as well.
The self-styled Customer Success Platform cloud provider is now also positioning itself as the Employee Success Platform provider, courtesy of a Salesforce for HR offering.
This isn’t the first push into the HR space for Salesforce, of course, but Work.com - built on the Rypple acquisition from a few years back - was essentially an HR performance management tool. This new bundle is built around employee engagement.
There will more information about Salesforce for HR from CEO Marc Benioff today as the Salesforce World Tour kicks off in Chicago in a few hours time.
But yesterday I got a preview of what’s in store from Jim Sinai, Senior Director, AppExchange & Platform Marketing, who began by talking about the emergence of an apps-based “instant gratification” culture that has by-passed HR:
People expect on-demand services, but then they walk into an office and it’s like stepping back in time. Someone, somewhere is probably using a fax machine to file their HR benefits. Employees want to have the same experience as they do in their personal lives.
The simple fact is that HR technology and apps for employees are systems of record built for transactions, not as systems of engagement. What if we could help customers engage and retain employees as we do with customers?
In other words:
We’re taking CRM and pointing it inwards.
The positioning
So, that’s the mile-high elevator pitch. What’s actually being delivered? According to the Salesforce collateral, the line up is:
- Employee Journeys - to provide employees with a personalized journey from on-boarding on day one to ongoing development plans.
- Employee Communities - connect colleagues and cultivate a culture of collaboration.
- HR Help Desk - to deliver personalized self-service experience via HR Help Desk built on Service Cloud.
- Salesforce HR Analytics - built on Wave.
- Engagement Apps - built using Salesforce1 and with an ecosystem of partners, including Appirio, Deloitte, Jobscience and Lumesse.
What this isn’t, is a directly competitive move against the likes of Workday or Oracle Fusion HCM.
In fact, to a large degree, the Salesforce play assumes the existence of an HCM system already in place at prospects with which the Salesforce for HR components will integrate, although that’s not essential, says Sinai:
Most enterprise companies will have some form of HCM. But delivering an HR Helpdesk is not predicated on having an HCM system. We are unifying all the different points of silos and systems of records into one platform.
Early users of Salesforce for HR are named as KeyBank, The Warranty Group and St. Josephs Health, with the latter’s VP of IT David Baker contributing:
St. Joseph Health is using Salesforce to increase engagement and improve productivity for employees at 14 facilities across two states. Employees want the conveniences of consumer-inspired mobile and social technologies available to help them do their jobs better. With Salesforce, we can give that to them. It is helping us revolutionize the way we interact and solve problems as a team.
Sinai expanded on that:
There’s a big move towards empowering nurses as primary healthcare givers, almost like a doctor would be in the old days, so retaining nurses is really important. Hospitals need to find a way for sharing best practices [in HCM]. St Joseph started by replacing Sharepoint and adding in apps that really power HR.
In the list of partners that Salesforce is flagging up who will help deliver this to market are the likes of Appirio and Deloitte, who provide the necessary supportive statements of intent for the new initiative.
I wondered whether Workday - which is Salesforce’s own HCM system of choice and is positioned as a close ally - would be joining the list of partners? Sinai was careful in his response, saying not much more than:
We are both big supporters of each other.
So I’m taking that as a no - or at the most generous interpretation, a ‘not at the moment’.
No doubt we’ll get reaction from other HCM competitors in the coming hours and days.
My take
While the title Salesforce for HR might at first make the unwary suspect that this is a dive into Workday/Oracle/SAP SuccessFactors territory, in reality it’s a pragmatic re-pitching of external-facing CRM offerings to an internal-facing HR audience.
The Customer Success Platform becomes the Employee Success Platform - on the face of it a sound enough elevator pitch.
It will be interesting to see how Benioff sells it today, as the messaging on show in Chicago will be repeated many times over the coming months as the World Tour continues. We’ll return to this topic once we’ve heard what’s being said in the Windy City.
Disclosure - at time of writing, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and Workday are premier partners of diginomica.