KronosWorks - R&D Investment, Customer Success and Analytics

Kronos started its yearly KronosWorks user conference at the beautiful Aria Hotel in Las Vegas with 2500+ attendees.

Here are my Top 3 takeaways from the keynote:

• Kronos invests in R&D - Kronos keeps investing into R&D - a good sign but also a table stake in the fast growing and hyper competitive HCM market. And it’s good to see the priority is both on good housekeeping and differentiating new functionality. On the housekeeping side it looks that Kronos will be able to put away the issues experienced with Java on desktop for good in spring 2015 (largest applause by the customer audience), equally a new user interface is being well received by customers. On the differentiating capability side, Kronos is looking at (true) analytics, starting with the common scheduling problem, that schedules get changed right away after being published. Being able to advise a scheduler to make better scheduling decisions is going to be key for Kronos’ customers. Another area is going the addition of gamification elements, first shown in leaderboard functionality (more here). A good fill run down of all innovations areas can be found in this press release. 

Aron Ain opens KronosWorks, key branks in the Kronos Cloud

• Customer Success matters - During the keynote Kronos CEO Aron Ain re-iterated the vendor’s commitment to customer success, motivating customers to fill out surveys and sharing that he is looking at all of the surveys., particularly the voice notes, so time for Kronos customers to share their experiences. Though not stated explicitly, something maybe amiss here at Kronos, as Ain shared that the variable compensation of the Kronos professional services teams is now up to 50% based on customer feedback / satisfaction. A move other vendors have done already, but on the flipside may create conflicts between implementation budgets and consultants who want to please clients - an area to watch. Along the same lines, focused on customer success, Kronos will offer blue prints to help customers with going into other countries, helping with documentation of local regulations. 

Gamification powered Leaderboards are coming

• Analytics make the difference - As mentioned before above, analytics are key on the Kronos’ roadmap. Using Apache Spark is a good technology decision and it will be interesting to see what Kronos will do beyond scheduling quality. Overtime analysis was mentioned later during meetings with Bill Bartow. At the same time Kronos is ramping up professional services capabilities for both BigData and analytics products (more here). 

The new Kronos User Interface for Workforce Central

MyPOV