Why Your Future Depends on Engaging with Customers and Employees

In the age of social media, effective customer and employee engagement is becoming an increasingly important business initiative. Companies that effectively engage their customers experience greater customer loyalty and repeated patronage. Companies that effectively engage their employees can expect greater employee satisfaction and productivity. However, as the number of social channels continues to grow, engagement becomes increasingly difficult as constant bombardment of these channels often leads to alienation and fatigue. 

Enter the 9 C's of Engagement. Employ the 9 C's of Engagement to connect with your customers and employees in an increasingly saturated social environment.

In this interview at SXSW 2013, R "Ray" Wang explains how companies should be using the 9 C's of Engagement. 

Why Your Future Depends on Engaging with Customers and Employees

In the age of social media, effective customer and employee engagement is becoming an increasingly important business initiative. Companies that effectively engage their customers experience greater customer loyalty and repeated patronage. Companies that effectively engage their employees can expect greater employee satisfaction and productivity. However, as the number of social channels continues to grow, engagement becomes increasingly difficult as constant bombardment of these channels often leads to alienation and fatigue. 

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R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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Partnership Announcements Enhance Ultimate Software’s Offerings

Amidst a crowd of 1500 customers, partners, and attendees, Ultimate Software held their annual gathering from March 12th to March 15th, 2013 in Las Vegas.  Geared towards the medium sized to enterprise markets, Ultimate Software has steadily taken market share from ADP for payroll and expanded out into operational and strategic human capital management (HCM) capabilities.  New mobile access, generation 4 cloud architecture, and timeline features for employee’s highlight Ultimate’s growing ambitions and customer requirements.

At the event, Ultimate announced two strategic partnerships that bode well for customers and prospects facing an increasing level of customer complexity and growing need for global capabilities:

• Celergo partnership adds global payroll capabilities to internationalization efforts. Celergo’s founder and CEO, Michele Honomichi, and Adam Rogers announced on stage global payroll services support for 110 countries and the ability to process payroll in over 150 countries.  In addition, Ultimate’s Spring and Fall 2013 release of the flagship UltiPro includes support for 28 country specific localizations such as Australia, Brazil, China, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, and Thailand.  Other key features include, global compensation management, localized compliance for data and employee privacy rules, and additional language translations.
  
  Point of View (POV): Ultimate’s customers operate in 144 countries.  As organizations follow the growth overseas, the global payroll connector and Celergo partnership gives mid market and enterprise customers a competitive option as they expand their presence abroad and usage of UltiPro.  These proactive steps to address global capabilities now, provide a key differentiation among potential competitors and places Ultimate Software in a potential position of international expansion.

• Informatica partnership paves the way for future cloud partnerships.  At the conference, Informatica announced a self-service solution for HCM data connections.  Built on top of UltiPro Carrier Network (UCN), customers have access to over 100 packaged connectors to benefits carriers and third party solutions.
  
  (POV): Customers and prospects do not want to worry about integration of their employee records or people management solutions with medical, dental, vision, and other benefits providers.  In the long term, customers seek worry free integration platforms to third party applications, cloud ecosystems, and mobile ecosystems.  The partnership with Informatica solves the needs of complex integration scenarios.  However, Ultimate may want to consider offering a lower cost alternative for more point to point integration scenarios.

The Bottom Line: Focus On Customer Success Pays Off In Continued Growth

Ultimate has done a great job establishing themselves as the ‘people company’ in the cloud HCM space.  From the opening keynote to hallway conversations with customers, executives, and Ultimate employees, its focus on people is clearly a big part of the company’s long track record for success.  In every client interaction, it’s clear that Ultimate has built strong partnerships with customers.

Ultimate continues to dominate its payroll niche of  200 to 1000 and 1000+ employees.  This puts them above Intuit and below Ceridan and Workday in size of customers.  In fact, many of the customers have already expanded from HR, payroll, benefits and payments into recruitment, planning, on boarding, performance management, succession management, and time and attendance.  The next opportunity will include more strategic HCM, identity management, improved mobile access, and payment technologies.

Your POV

Are you an Ultimate customer? Do you plan to invest more or less with them in 2013?  What do you think about their strategy?   Are you ready for strategic HCM? Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org or R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com

Please let us know if you need help with your apps strategy.  Sign up for a Constellation Academy Workshop or let us assist with:

• Assessing readiness
• Designing your strategy
• Assessing integration capability
• Vendor selection
• Connecting with other pioneers

Reprints

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact Sales .

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions.  However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

Copyright © 2001 – 2013 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
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Are Microsoft and Nokia Tightly Aligned Over VP8 Intellectual Properly Infringement?

Alumni: Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Dr. Brent Kelly is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research and President of KelCor, Inc. He focuses on the unique intersection of unified communications, social business, cloud services, video and mobility.  Dr. Kelly provides strategy and counsel to key clients including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, technology policy executives, sell-side firms and technology buyers. Prior to joining Constellation, Dr. Kelly served for 10 years as a partner at Wainhouse Research where he was the primary author of most of the firm’s unified communications reports and forecasts. Dr. Kelly is a regular presenter at Enterprise Connect (formerly VoiceCon), the communications industry trade show where his well…...

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On March 21, Nokia came out swinging directly at Google and indirectly at the emerging WebRTC standard when it claimed that VP8, the video codec within WebRTC, contains Nokia intellectual property. Nokia's action complicates the issue of the default video codec within WebRTC because Nokia has stated that it will not license any of its patented technology to the IETF.

In 2010, Google paid $123 million to buy On2 Technologies, which gave Google rights to the VP8 codec, and it promptly turned around and licensed the codec at no charge to the IETF for use in WebRTC. Later Google and the MPEG LA consortium agreed to terms that further unencumbered the VP8 codec for free distribution (no word on how much this cost Google).

Nokia's unwillingness to license its intellectual property threatens the use of VP8 in WebRTC. Nokia would prefer to see the royalty laden H.264 codec (and subsequent derivatives) used in WebRTC.

But, this is also what Microsoft would prefer. Microsoft has offered a CU-RTC-Web standard, which allows the use of other codecs besides VP8, to the standards bodies. However, CU-RTC-Web has been rejected by the IETF. Microsoft's motivation is, in part, to save its $8.5 billion investment in Skype, the usefulness of which WebRTC may seriously damage.

One has to believe there is alignment, or at least discussion, of some sort between Nokia and Microsoft on this issue. Stephen Elop, Nokia's current CEO, was the former president of Microsoft's Business Division. He joined Nokia in 2010, and shortly thereafter Nokia and Microsoft announced a partnership in which Nokia "bet the farm" by changing its smartphone operating system to Windows Phone software.  The two companies stand to lose big to Google if Google Chrome becomes widely accepted as an operating system and as Android continues its momentum as the market leading operating system on smartphones and tablets.

Large companies forming alliances to thwart other companies is not new, and Google is clearly doing this itself as it joined HTC in fighting against Nokia's lawsuit claiming intellectual property infringement in HTC's use of VP8 in its Android-based phones.

Microsoft's Derek Burney, Corporate VP Skype Division, told the audience at Enterprise Connect 2013 in March that Microsoft would adopt WebRTC as soon as the standard is ratified. Nokia's action further delays WebRTC ratification, giving Microsoft more time to suggest protocol alternatives to WebRTC and/or suggest the ability to place alternative codecs within the WebRTC framework.

Having had long experience in the video communications market, I have thought for some time that alternatives to VP8 need to be possible in WebRTC to make it a living standard. The reason is that every five years or so the video codecs get incrementally better, and it would be a shame not to be able to use the very best codecs as they become available. However, the downside of this approach is that new codecs typically have royalties associated with them and they would not be free for use in the browser. Proprietary extensions of WebRTC would certainly emerge, complicating widespread use of WebRTC. VP8 is intended to be an all-purpose video codec that is "good enough" for most video applications. Google is working on VP9, which will likely be licensed to the IETF for use in WebRTC at no charge, but overcoming the current hurdle Nokia just erected for VP8 is key to making this a reality.