In the first of a series profiling the winners of the Software Satisfaction Awards, Cynthia Hammond from Softscape tells Lucie Mitchell why she thinks they won the Enterprise Software award in the HR category.

Softscape is an integrated human capital management software vendor, which aims to provide solutions that enable organisations to drive business performance through more effective people management. It is a global organisation, with offices in the USA, England, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand and South Africa.

This year, Softscape won the enterprise software category at the Software Satisfaction Awards. Cynthia Hammond, global PR manager for the company, says that Softscape’s focus on customer results, its passion for innovation and its global experience, all helped in winning the award.

“Softscape’s success is based on its commitment to customers – our renewal rate is an industry leading 98% – and our mission is to continually develop innovative ways for an organisation to manage the management, appraisal, growth, and development of its most important asset – people,” says Hammond. “Softscape has helped organisations around the world optimize their workforce processes, enhance productivity, facilitate planning, reduce paper-based processing, and simplify basic work functions.”

One of Softscape’s main goals, says Hammond, is to continually innovate so as to provide customers with the best possible solution. “We reinvest 34% of revenues back into R&D and ongoing innovation. We have a very dedicated engineering development team, which has not experienced turnover in nearly 10 years.”

Softscape works closely with customers to further innovate and change how organisations leverage technology to better manage their workforces. “In thoroughly understanding where customers need to be, we are helping to bring this industry to a whole new level of achievement,” remarks Hammond.

Changing times

Softscape’s customers are all facing major issues impacting companies today, including the economy, labour shortages, changing demographics and globalisation, says Hammond. “This leads to some major challenges for HR, such as gaps in leadership pipeline, creating a performance-driven culture, difficulty filling key positions, retention problems, and developing new skills to meet business needs,” she adds.

“Softscape addresses these critical issues by providing advanced technology and global services to help organisations better manage their people and their businesses. Our software enables customers to enhance productivity, improve effectiveness, facilitate long-term planning, reduce operational costs, and drive organisational performance.”

When it comes to keeping customers satisfied, Hammond says that Softscape strives to build long-lasting partnerships with all their customers. As such, they have a dedicated customer care team.

“Every customer is assigned an experienced account manager whose job it is to ensure customer success. Every Softscape employee must be certified in the use of our technology, so we are experts in helping our customers.”

The results speak for themselves, she adds. “Softscape’s customer retention rate is 98%, and more than 70% of our customers expand their deployments with Softscape each year.”

Another way of keeping customers happy with the product, is to involve them in the design and development process. “Softscape has created easy-to-use, configurable, flexible products, all on one integrated platform,” explains Hammond. “We back up our products with world class support from our offices throughout the world, providing localized support for all customers. We solicit customer input throughout the development process and select customers test all new versions before they are generally made available.”

Customer feedback is also a large part of the process. “We actively solicit feedback in multiple ways – online, live meetings, customer conference, and through our extensive customer care team,” comments Hammond. “All feedback is reviewed by our product management and development teams. We listen to our customers’ needs and implement solutions to address those needs.”

Hammond states that the future of HR technology is in leveraging existing knowledge and skills already across the enterprise to make an immediate and bottom-line impact.

“We’ve worked closely with customers over the past year to define what’s needed to make employees more effective on the job. Softscape is on the cutting edge of technology linking strategic HR functions with knowledge-sharing tools to help organisations better manage their business.”

For more information, please vist the Software Satisfaction Awards website.