Remember those old Men’s Wearhouse commercials, with the owner promising you’ll love the way you look or your money back? Well this week at its Vision 2015 customer event, WorkForce Software upped the partnership ante by offering to pay for fines and penalties if their client organizations are found in violation of compliance regulations. This marks a new level of commitment in the workforce management software world to partnership with clients. Many organizations have made access to continually up-to-date legal information regarding compliance part of their offering, but have not moved to the level of guarantee.
There is, of course, fine print – customers have to be up-to-date on releases, among other conditions. But more important than the actual monetary value of the guarantee is the statement it makes about the provider/client partnership. This relationship has been growing in importance in recent years with the shift to software as a service. Organizations are no longer buying a tool, they are entering a long-term relationship in which they are imparting their trust in a partner to execute on critical business functionality. By not only taking on the responsibility — but also the accountability — for ensuring that clients remain in compliance, WorkForce Software continues to strengthen these critical partnerships.
WorkForce Software also continues to expand the idea partnership with its alliance ecosystem. It continues to deepen its relationship with Success Factors and its partnership with Oracle to deliver EmpCenter, its flagship product, inside Oracle’s HCM cloud offering. In today’s marketplace, many providers are realizing the importance of having good relationships, not only with their clients, but with other solution providers that may have the potential to be competitors. This also demonstrates WorkForce Software’s confidence in its ability to go up against not only niche workforce management competitors, but integrated suite offerings for organizations that require deep time and attendance and compliance capability.
This will be a space to watch as labor law complexity continues to grow, the Affordable Care Act comes back into focus, and organizations continue to realize the value of workforce data to perform meaningful business analytics. And as organizations work to ensure that they look good when it comes to compliance, we will see how much they value partners who are willing to guarantee it.
–Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi
