Supernova Award Category

The Problem

Ceridian was looking to build credible peer-to-peer market awareness and drive sales for its new product, Dayforce Human Capital Management (HCM), which had to compete with countless competitors that had established customer bases.  

Ceridian needed to identify specific customers with great stories to tell, engage them on their terms, and get their success stories in front of prospective customers.  Doing this was difficult because customer satisfaction, availability and preferences for participating in activities fluctuate.  Knowing what individual customer was happy and available to engage a prospect, brief an analyst or participate in an event was incredibly difficult to manage manually because Ceridian didn't know the customer’s real-time status.  Knowing which customers had the best story and getting them to amplify it within their vertical industry to their peers was a challenge.

The Solution

Ceridian brought together Customer, Sales and Marketing Teams to analyze the problem. Collaboratively the opportunities that surfaced were:

• recognizing the success of customers
• building a peer-to-peer community
• delivering on prospects’ desire for information and salespeople’s’ need for collateral
• enabling customer networking

To effectively deliver the above, these three teams partnered to change Ceridian from an ‘Inside Out Marketing Group’ to one that delivered the voices of our customers to the marketplace, advocating their success utilizing Ceridian solutions.

With stakeholders buy- in, the missing piece was the technology to meet the needs of all groups, realize the opportunities above and nurture the customer relationship at scale.

An advocacy platform was chosen due to the customer centric nature. Once the technology was implemented, Ceridian’s XOXO program was then realized.

The results

With XOXO, there has been an emphasis on organizational alignment and involvement from all executive levels. In fact, XOXO Directors engage very early in the customer life cycle and are both Auditors and Lobbyists for the customer experience.

The program was launched with full support from the CEO and given unfettered access to creative and tactical resources available within the organization.XOXO extends the value of being a Ceridian customer beyond products and services by engaging customers professionally and emotionally. XOXO offers:

XOXOMatch - Members can review posts online from other customers wanting to connect. Whether they are looking to resolve a problem or share an accomplishment, they can read posts from others and see the other customer’s name, company name and functional role before accepting the match. If they don’t find a post they can create their own.  This logistically matches members with the right customers on their own terms.

HCMentor - XOXO Members are given opportunities to raise their professional profile by enrolling to mentor new customers. They are systematically educated, qualified, on boarded and matched to further ensure the success of the new customer.

Mentors are given opportunities to speak/write and offered skills to add to their resume and LinkedIn profile.

New customers also experience faster time to revenue/ROI and a better implementation experience.

Metrics

Customers participating in the XOXO program have an average NPS averaging more than 20 points higher than our general customer population NPS. 

For instance, Noah Katz, Co-President, PSK Foodtown, http://vimeo.com/ceridian/review/88767725/9491a61a2a, a regional independent grocer in NYC is a Ceridian Dayforce customer who has become very active within the XOXO program.  Noah has accepted dozens of opportunities to connect with other grocers as a reference and presented his thoughts on payroll cost control with Dayforce at the National Grocer’s Association annual conference.

Noah represents one of the 1,425 XOXO customer members who have joined the program.  In total, 11,767 activities have been completed in the XOXO Portal.  These have included over 1,008 peer-to-peer engagements, formerly called reference conversations saving Ceridian sellers thousands of hours sourcing their own references and contributing to tens of millions of dollars in sales. 

Ceridian’s XOXO program has delivered customers for dozens of event speakers, press releases, analysts’ briefings, social media posts and over 70 video testimonials. 

Ceridian’s success is directly related to the cumulative success of our individual customers and the deployment of the XOXO has greatly amplified Ceridian’s success. 

The voices of our advocates are captured here:  http://vimeo.com/ceridian/review/104102531/f73bd90575

The Technology

Ceridian launched the Ceridian XOXO program using Influitive’s AdvocateHub technology.

Disruptive Factor

The road to Ceridian’s XOXO program has been very thorough as the adoption for this program required buy-in from several departments and executives.

The XOXO program is unique. Customers, and even Ceridian field employees, had never seen a program focused on amplifying the successes of customers, before.  When initially launched customers and employees alike had to be educated on the details and benefits of the program.  There is now significant momentum and participation so the program purpose is clearly evident to new members.

Ceridian’s XOXO program is unlike any other program in the HCM industry. Competitors are merely marketing their solutions on a technical level and sending their sales force to generate business. In addition, their reference programs are out of date and regularly rely on disturbing to the same customers and on the company’s terms to convince a prospect to buy.

This is not the case at Ceridian. With the XOXO program Ceridian is able to identify, in a ‘live’ fashion, which customers are best aligned with a prospect or marketing department’s need while delivering deserved recognition to program members. Ceridian customers are “selling” to their peers and launching credible conversations in a way that Ceridian could never achieve on its own.  

Shining Moment

XOXO was recently recognized with a BIG BAM BUSINESS IMPACT AWARD, as well as three InfluenceHR Marketing Awards including: Best In Show, Customer Success and Marketing Innovation.

Howard Tarnoff is an advocate marketing thought-leader. He was a customer experience innovator panelist during the Constellation Research Connected Enterprise conference in 2014, and presented at the industry’s first Customer Experience Event: Advocamp 2015