If you visited sunny San Diego last week and participated in Cornerstone’s annual Convergence user conference, you heard it:
- Consumerization
- Client-Centricity
- User Experience
These three strategies represent the bedrock of Cornerstone’s 21st century approach to exceeding client expectations. So what do they mean? Cornerstone CEO Adam Miller, leadership team, and even select clients invested the better part of last week informing attendees about how the new ways we work today are enabled by these three technology power plays.
Consumerization
Cornerstone believes that consumerization of talent technology has much less to do with the workforce and much more to do with how the workforce works. Cornerstone’s new onboarding tools (coming next month), Connect platform (the Facebook for the enterprise), mobile applications (to include gamification, not just “points and badges”) and many innovations enable employees to work anytime, anywhere – the rule for all Millenials.
Consumerization is creating real opportunity to improve productivity in our diverse workforce and enable organizations to be more connected and innovative than ever before. Cornerstone gets consumerization and their newest solutions show it. If you haven’t had an opportunity to see them, take a minute to take a look.
Client Centricity
Truly delighting customers tops Cornerstone’s list of priorities and this week that message reverberated loud and clear over and over again. Cornerstone leadership had the huxpah to invite three customers – Hallmark, University of Southern California, and Staples – to share their Cornerstone story with a group of savvy industry analysts.
Each shared the good and the not so good about their Cornerstone implementation and experience. One customer initially deployed Cornerstone some 8 years ago and another described implementation just a few short months in the making. So, while their implementation tenures were quite divergent, their accolades of the technology functionality, the impact it had on their ability to meet business goals (one company’s revamped performance management process enabled by Cornerstone saved $1.4M), and Cornerstone’s exemplary “client success” partnerships with them were all similar. Sure, there was a complaint or two along the way — “I wish they would do a better job at helping me think about what I haven’t thought about already” — but when asked, “Why Cornerstone?,” all three, in their own way, strongly towed this party line: I went with Cornerstone because of “their product, their passion, and their people.”
User Experience
When it comes to technology, there is nothing more important than the user experience regardless of who the user is – employee, manager, executive, HR and Talent Leader, HRBP, channel partner, or whoever. Today’s user has two key expectations: make it simple and intuitive, and be darn sure that it enables interaction and collaboration because connecting with peers is how I get my work done.
Regardless of which piece of the Cornerstone solution you are talking about – succession, learning, compensation, onboarding, performance, recruiting, reporting, extended enterprise learning, mobile, social, connection to Salesforce (yes, they have it all — well, almost; predictive analytics is not quite there yet) — colorful, intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces fuel the user experience.
If you prefer that the interface and workflow aligns just a bit closer to your unique way of work with your brand, then Tribridge (a Cornerstone partner) enables personalization and customization, including tweaking the interface, creating customized reporting dashboards and integrating third-party applications.” So, check the box here too … Cornerstone is nailing the user experience expectation.
If this wasn’t enough to wow the crowd of hundreds at Convergence this week, then Cornerstone took care to cap off the attendee experience by treating all to a private Poison concert aboard the USS Midway during the last night of the conference. What a jam! If you missed it, you missed out!
See you next year at Cornerstone Convergence 2015!
Until next time …
—Laci Loew, Vice President Talent Management Practice and Principal Analyst
Brandon Hall Group
