Workday Combines Service, Support into ‘Customer Experience’ Organization

Workday has combined its services and support functions into a single Customer Experience organization and created a chief customer officer position to lead it. The role’s been filled by Emily McEvilly, who had been senior vice president of services.

The company said McEvilly’s job is to ensure “deployment success and customer satisfaction,” and to drive innovations that will increase its products’ overall value to customers. The move was made in response to what Workday perceives as changing customer needs.

In a blog post, McEvilly said Workday decided to increase its focus on customer experience after hearing feedback that customers “want us to continually raise our game.” The customer experience group will help sales, support, marketing and services teams “further serve the needs of our growing customer base at scale.”

A big part of Workday’s thinking seems to center on breaking down siloes. Previously, McEvilly said, marketing, sales, services, products and partners—all of which have an impact on the customer experience—worked to address customer needs on a function-by-function basis. “Uniting these organizations through a single vision enables us to deliver a more seamless and impactful end-to-end journey for our customers,” she said.

Conversations with customers helped the company better understand how their needs vary by industry, location and market even while they provided more insight into their purchasing and deployment decisions.

Workday Proactive

McEvilly described her job as being “the chief advocate for our customers and how they experience Workday at every touchpoint.”

Several financial analysts have noted that Workday enjoys a healthy customer satisfaction rate, so creating a customer experience group could indicate the company’s simply being proactive about its approach to the customer experience. The company has made several recent moves to hedge against a possible softening in the HR software market, according to media reports, such as its November acquisition of Scout RFP.

In October, Workday introduced several applications, including People Experience, People Analytics and Credentials. The company said the products resulted from “significant and unique investments” to build solutions for “a multi-faceted workforce, new ways of working and a distributed workplace.”

Before joining Workday in 2010, McEvilly spent 10 years working with clients at Oracle and PeopleSoft.

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Image: Workday