There is no doubt that the employee and manager experience has been a design focus of HR Technology vendors for the last few years. Hours have been spent in design studies watching employees navigate HR applications – focusing on reducing clicks while still providing an engaging and self-reliant experience. Sophisticated algorithms and artificial intelligence have been embedded throughout solutions in hopes of accelerating data-driven decision-making. Major investments in digital adoption tools and chatbot assistants literally walk employees and managers through every step of their HR process.

These efforts have not been in vain, as our HR Technology environments have become more aligned with consumer-grade technology, we’ve seen increasing adoption and access to necessary workforce data.

Still, as so much progress has been made in our ultimate end-user experiences, many vendors have lost sight of the experience of those supporting and maintaining our HR System environments. These critical roles are still spending over 40% of their time on reconfiguring systems, integration issues, and running regular reports. Poorly designed HR administration pages and setup processes can cost an organization both time and valuable data quality, not to mention possible data privacy risks. 

Over 25% of our annual survey respondents this year told us a lack of systems training and knowledge is one of the top reasons their HR applications are not meeting their business needs. Among our 5000 + written responses this year, we saw a number of comments on these issues:

“Admin staff have not been sufficiently trained in the system and its peculiarities, so we are managing to use the system, but not effectively”

“There are applications we are not currently using because we haven’t been trained on them”

“Training is not as good as we would have expected for such a high-end system—we sent a team member to integration training, and she was frustrated by the lack of instruction”

The Voice of the HR Customer is important, and HR technology software providers and consulting firms need to hear them. This is just one of the many reasons why we’ve continued to track User Experience and Vendor Satisfaction ratings from HR buyers every year in our annual survey. We received and validated customer ratings and feedback on over 250 + vendor solutions this year from the HR community. It’s a major undertaking, but over a quarter of our survey respondents say they participate to support their HR community and share vendor feedback. In any improvement process, feedback is critical.

It is an honor to share the feedback we receive annually with the community, but I’ll admit sharing  positive feedback is always more enjoyable! This year Sapient Insights Annual HR Systems Survey White Paper, 25th Edition highlights 38 vendors, who achieved Top Five customer ratings status in 10 major HR system categories. Only eight vendors achieved the highest customer ratings in both User Experience and Vendor Satisfaction in their various categories and/or size segments, a real accomplishment. To celebrate these achievements in our 25th year, we are launching a series of Voice of the Customer badges to underscore these phenomenal achievements.

The eight organizations achieving #1 ratings in both User Experience and Vendor Satisfaction from their customers this year include:

For more details on all the organizations that achieved Top Five ratings, along with the HR Tech community’s plans for acquiring and using their HR technologies be sure to download this year’s full Sapient Insights 2022-2023 Annual HR Systems Survey White Paper, 25th Edition. HR friends, we’d love to hear your thoughts on how the HR Technology community can support you and how our team at Sapient Insights Group can continue to improve our research process to meet your needs.

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