CX Lags Behind

Many Customer Experience (CX) teams lack the data integration of their Sales and Marketing counterparts.

Sales departments tend to operate using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Salesforce (SFDC) and, by 2022, have likely already integrated with other data sets like Jira or Salesloft. Likewise, Marketing tends to run the marketing automation platform with data that syncs not only to Salesforce but other publishing or analytics tools.

Integrated data is how Sales and Marketing gets done. Less so for CX.

In 2022, expect the CX function to evolve in many organizations. CX has collected numerous potential data sets just waiting to be leveraged:

• Internal customer behaviors, transactions, and profiles.
• Third-party data on customer attitudes, purchase preferences and digital actions.
• Social media activity.
• IoT data collected in store or on location regarding customer health, usage, and sentiment.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).

Alchemer predicts that this next year will see CX departments evolve from data consumers to data contributors, sharing critical customer interactions throughout their journey.

Learning How To Share Customer Data

Customer data needs to flow to frontline employees and tools, like a company CRM, via an application programming interface (API). The API can serve as a catalyst for automated actions based on metrics like lead score.

McKinsey tells the story of a credit card company that adopted an omnichannel strategy to boost digital performance. They used CX data to identify and track factors influencing customer satisfaction and business performance with good effect:

“This analytics-driven approach gave the company a quantified and systematic view into the problems, opportunity areas, and channel interactions across millions of customers, enabling the organization to support a systematic journey-improvement cycle.”

The credit card company focused investments and efforts on the specific moments that mattered to customers and reduced operational costs by 10-25% as a result of the CX transformation. These results were only possible by funneling CX data to the platforms and internal players who could impact success.

The Alchemer NPS Story

At Alchemer, we live the data integration story every day. Data integration is the essential component in how our teams coordinate for customer benefit.

We didn’t just use data integration to reduce costs — we reduced customer churn by 3% in our first year, potentially adding millions of dollars to our bottom line, and improved our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 15%.

Data integration has directly led to data action at Alchemer. Like many companies, we collect NPS scores from customers. But NPS has a dirty secret — very few companies do anything with the data. They may look at the metric every quarter, but few act on it.

At Alchemer, we ensure that NPS is treated as the valuable piece of data it is. NPS is routed to:

• SFDC Service Cloud: Tickets are created for the customer service team who review each piece of feedback and respond to supportable questions.
• SFDC CRM: NPS and verbatim comments are added to accounts for full historical visibility by Sales/Success leaders.
• Slack: NPS feedback is shared across a company-wide channel for transparency and to individual customer success managers in charge of managing that account.
• Email: NPS feedback is routed to customer success managers via email so that action can be taken immediately.
• DOMO: NPS is correlated with financial data for better clarity for the executive team.

The key technical component was integration of the data so that it was routed directly into the systems and processes our teams use every day. But empowering customer facing employees to respond and take action upon the feedback as part of their day-to-day processes was how we improved our NPS score by 15%

In the recent Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper, commissioned by Alchemer, “Smoke and Mirrors: Why Customer Experience Programs Miss Their Mark,” only 29% of CX respondents say they can meaningfully act on the data they collect and only 17% say that feedback is communicated to the appropriate internal teams to act on it.

Companies have invested heavily in creating customer programs that do a pretty good job of listening and analyzing feedback, but are terrible at responding to the input from their customers.

Collecting and seeing data is the first step. But acting on data is a trend Alchemer expects to see much more in 2022.

The post CX Prediction 2022.3 — From Data Collection to Data Action appeared first on Alchemer.

Recently, Alchemer hosted a webinar with HR.com to talk about the challenges of returning to the workplace after 14 to 18 months away. The panelists – Vanessa Bagnato, Director of Enterprise Solutions, and Sue Bonsor, Director of Customer Support at Alchemer – talked about the different workplace models and considerations for developing a return-to-work plan, and involving employees in the decision during the webinar.  

Different Work Models 

Returning to the Way it Was. Even though we now must create more hygienic work environments with less communal food, this model tries to recreate the way the organization worked before the pandemic.  

Clubhouse Model. This hybrid model encourages employees to come to the office when they need to collaborate, and work from home when they need to work without interruptions. In this case the office serves more as a hub. 

Activity-based Working. In this model, employees work from the office, but no longer have assigned desks. Instead, they spend their day working where it makes the most sense – in a team huddle, with one other person, or alone. Some companies use a reservation process to ensure each employee has a desk. This allows organizations to operate in smaller spaces with fewer desks than employees. 

Hub-and-Spoke Model. This approach creates smaller satellite offices closer to where employees live, cutting commute times while giving employees the benefits of face-to-face interactions. 

Fully Virtual. This model is how most companies worked during the pandemic, where employees work from any location, such as home or anywhere they like.  

How Others Are Doing It 

A Gartner study showed that 82 percent of companies intend to permit some remote working as people return to the office. However, 30 percent of corporate leaders worry about maintaining their corporate culture without people in the office.  

Google has announced plans to reopen offices with some locations returning to work before September first. However, offices will operate at limited capacity, taking regional health guidelines into consideration. Google also announced that they expect employees to live within commuting distance of an office – in effect, choosing a hybrid model over the fully remote model that some other tech companies, such as Twitter have chosen. 

Allstate Insurance surveyed employees and found that many employees did not want to return to the office full-time. After analysis, Allstate realized that most functions don’t require an office setting. They announced that 75 percent of the roles can be performed remotely, while 24 percent can be done on a hybrid basis. The remaining 1 percent will return to a pre-COVID style of office setting. This includes some top executives and certain customer-facing roles. 

Apple employees did not feel heard and are pushing back against a new policy that required them to return to work three days a week. Employees wanted a more flexible approach to work remotely with over 80 employees writing a letter to leadership expressing their thoughts and desire to be asked. Many employees have chosen to leave, especially in light of both Facebook and Twitter telling employees they can work from home forever. 

Atlassian revealed a new Team Anywhere policy, the company requires staff to travel to their nearest office four times a year. Based on employee surveys, the company expects to have about 50-percent office attendance. 

Considerations 

When you develop or finalize your Return to the Workplace plan, there are several considerations to take into account.  

1. Establish what your employees want and what your company needs to maintain your corporate culture, then determine the return-to-work approach that is best for your organization. 
2. Map out a timeline to set expectations for employees. Employees need to plan for childcare, family care, commuting, pet care, and other situations that might have changed over the past 16 months or so. Even if the timeline changes, employees will be more understanding if there is transparency about expectations. A McKinsey study found that employees want more certainty about post-pandemic working arrangement, even if businesses don’t yet know what to say. According to the McKinsey study, organizations that have already articulated more specific policies about the workplace have seen employee well-being and productivity rise. 
3. Get feedback from employees on the plan.  
4. Evaluate the physical workspace and ensure that it is safe for your employees.  
5. Consult with local government guidelines, which can vary by city, county, state, province, and country.  
6. Determine policies surrounding employee screenings and protocols. 
7. If you require daily health assessments or other check-ins, Alchemer found that posting a QR code at every door really simplified compliance. 
8. Determine how you will deal with vaccinated versus non-vaccinated employees. This is a very sensitive topic that could become an inclusivity issue. 
9. Decide what, if any, protective gear or cleaning supplies you need. 
10. Determine your corporate travel policy both domestically and internationally. 
11. Do not expect your plans to be static. You will need to monitor employee satisfaction (pulse surveys really help here) and be flexible with iterations due to employee feedback or changes to government guidelines or other factors. 

With the dangerous Delta variant cropping up, we all should plan to have our plans change. Remember to continue to communicate with employees and government health officials to protect your people. 

To learn about Alchemer’s Return-to-Work solution, click here. 

The post Returning to the Office Creates New Concerns for HR appeared first on Alchemer.

Running security risk assessments is one of the most thankless jobs in information security. Yet it’s necessary to keep your InfoSec process strong. So, you send out a standard form to a vendor or to your internal team and then hound them to return it. People leave sections blank or don’t get the right information because they don’t know how to share the spreadsheet or answer the questions. Completing the assessment takes weeks, not to mention the days of your time because you must go back and forth with people to get the answers you need. 

And when it all takes longer than everybody hoped, Information Security is seen as a pinch point in the purchasing process. Which isn’t half as bad as getting blamed when something goes horribly wrong because somebody didn’t follow protocol and identify then mitigate risks.  

This is why risk assessments are a critical component of your Security Program, as well as any security standards you want to tout, including ISO-27001 or SOC compliance. So how do you perform risk assessments quickly and painlessly while still doing everything else on your list? 

Manage Risk, Not Questionnaires 

Given our own struggles with completing internal risk assessments as well as external ones for vendors, Alchemer developed the Risk Assessment Solution to be a flexible and automated process for conducting vendor and enterprise risk assessments. We even made it easy to break out the questions so the right person within any organization can answer them and to only ask the questions relevant to that vendor type instead of one-size-fits-all. And we automated the notifications, so you know when the survey is complete.  

In short, it gives InfoSec teams more time for managing and mitigating risks rather than trying to track down fifty questions on a spreadsheet. The solution includes a complete suite of pre-configured surveys, workflows, and risk reports, so information security can focus on acting on their data, rather than collecting it.   

Focus on Information Security, not Irrelevant Questions 

We’ve all received a form or spreadsheet that had more questions that were irrelevant than were relevant simply because it’s easier to ask all the questions than miss one. You can create custom surveys for software vendors that will store customer data, independent contractors, and web-based applications that help people manage their calendars or the like.  

Because you can send over only the questions that matter, people are more likely to complete the survey. And you don’t have to wade through unanswered questions wondering if they missed it or it wasn’t relevant. Stop passing spreadsheets around like a game of telephone and get the right answers from the right SME the first time. This allows your security team to make accurate and informed decisions early in the process. 

Make Your Life Easier 

With the Alchemer Risk Assessment Solution, your InfoSec team selects the type of vendor, automatically adjusting the questions and default risk level, and sends a link to the assessment. The vendor can assign specific sections of the assessment to be completed by different team members and attach copies of requested policies. When the assessment is complete, the InfoSec team is notified, the raw scores are compiled automatically, and any raw score can be adjusted.  

At Alchemer, we took our vendor risk assessment process and incorporated it into our PO request workflow. If an employee submits a purchase order that requires an InfoSec review, the internal vendor risk assessment is automatically sent to the employee. Only once the employee completes the internal vendor request and it’s approved can the PO move forward in the process. 

In the end, you have a stronger information security program because manually collecting risks is no longer a problem. To strengthen your InfoSec program, learn how the Alchemer Risk Assessment Solution can save you time and help you build a strong InfoSec process. 

The post Vendor Security Risk Assessment Simplifies InfoSec appeared first on Alchemer.

Alchemer Customer Engagement for Sales is designed to help sales teams build hyper-personalized relationships with customers throughout the entire relationship. 

“It’s so frustrating to feel you have already told a company what you want and need, and they don’t seem to remember,” says Susan McGovern, Vice President of Customer Value and Enablement at Alchemer. “This happens all the time, especially when you’ve had a long sales cycle, a hand-off, or a long relationship. You have so many opportunities to capture information, and just as many to lose it. Something almost always gets lost or forgotten.” 

Alchemer Customer Engagement for Sales addresses the biggest pain points of hand-offs and personalizes your relationship with your customers. It captures feedback throughout the sales journey in the customers’ own words, so you don’t have to rely on the memory of internal team members. Everything is documented, from the first discovery through renewal and beyond. 

“In a recent report, Salesforce.com found that 73% of business customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations,” explains Vanessa Bagnato, Director of Enterprise Solutions at Alchemer. “Customer Engagement for Sales solves this problem by empowering sales teams of all sizes and roles to capture customer feedback at defined stages throughout the customer relationship.” 

Alchemer Customer Engagement for Sales works through a dedicated Customer Engagement portal that is integrated directly into Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. Your team can initiate, receive, review, and share feedback within the system they already use. In addition, all workflows, customer assessments, and handoff surveys can be prepopulated with additional account information already stored in your CRM. 

“With Customer Engagement for Sales, we can capture accurate information directly from customers without relying on the salesperson’s interpretation of what was said,” adds Susan. 

“The problem many sales teams encounter is finding a solution that makes it easy for all customer-facing sales members to capture customer feedback in an organized and consistent way, so that data can be easily analyzed and is fully integrated back into a CRM without manual entry,” according to Vanessa. “The Customer Engagement for Sales solution pre-populates account details, gives sales the ability to personalize the content, collects feedback directly from the customer, and then pushes all the data back into a CRM without the salesperson forgetting to manually enter the feedback or misinterpreting what was said.” 

“Time to value is everything,” explains Susan. “And customers want results as fast as possible. This solution pushes everything you need for a successful hand-off from pre-sales (or sales development) to sales, or to legal, professional services, finance, customer success, and anybody else needed to close the deal or help the customer get results quickly.” 

Meeting the needs, goals, and challenges of each customer is one goal of customer-centric selling. It also helps with longer sales and customer lifecycles. Over an 18-month sales cycle, players can change. The same is true once a customer has been with you for a while. There’s a good chance the person you started with will get promoted or find a new position, and the same might be true on your sales team. When that happens, Alchemer Customer Engagement for Sales provides easy access to all the reasons a customer first chose you, along with all you’ve done for that customer. That way you can bring everybody who is new to the account up to speed and keep things humming along. 

“Customers buy for a certain reason, but those needs evolve,” explains Susan. “This solution lets everybody understand the needs in the customer’s own words. It’s how you personalize each customer’s journey, shorten the sales cycle, and improve internal communications. Every customer wants to be treated like an individual. Now we can do that.” 

To learn more about Alchemer Customer Engagement for Sales, click here. 

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LOUISVILLE, Colorado, March 2, 2021 – Alchemer – a global leader in customer experience (CX) and voice-of-the-customer (VOC) technology – announced today that it has launched Customer Engagement for Sales, an integrated software solution that empowers sales teams to create a customer-centric selling model, integrating the voice of prospects and customers into hyper-personalized messaging for key interactions.

In a recent report, Salesforce.com found that 89% of business customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. With Alchemer Customer Engagement for Sales, sales teams of all sizes and roles can capture customer feedback at defined stages throughout the customer relationship. Complete captured relationship data and customer feedback are immediately recorded in a CRM, delivering feedback to customer-facing team members. Communications within the solution are pre-configured and in a single location including workflows. Everything is scalable and can be personalized by individual sales personnel.

“I’ve spent much of my career in sales-leadership positions and I wish this solution existed much sooner,” said Mary Beth Addison, Senior Vice President of Sales at Alchemer. “The Alchemer Customer Engagement for Sales solution empowers sales teams to collect the information needed to understand the unique voices of their prospects and customers to take action and move forward quickly. Business customers want to be treated as individuals. This solution makes that possible.”

“Transformation to a customer-centric organization involves both cultural and technical shifts,” said Ryan Tamminga, Vice President of Customer Success at Alchemer. “This solution immediately helps organizations to create hyper-personalized communications that will strengthen both customer relationships and the customer journey.”

About Alchemer

Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo) transforms customer feedback into operational gold to create customer-centric organizations. Alchemer provides a customer-experience platform and pre-packaged solutions that enable businesses to collect and act on feedback to find, get, and keep more customers and employees. Only Alchemer puts customers at the center of everything a company does by integrating feedback directly into the systems and applications that power the organization today. Alchemer serves more than 15,000 global customers and 30% of the Fortune 500.

For more information about the Alchemer Customer Engagement for Sales solution, visit https://www.alchemer.com/customer-engagement-for-sales/

The post Alchemer Empowers Sales Teams to Deliver Customer-Centric Selling Throughout the Customer Journey appeared first on Alchemer.

When the customer drives the sales process, everyone wins. Buyers demand an experience that is hyper-personalized to meet their exact needs. According to a study by Hannover Research, more than half of B2B customers will pay higher prices for tailored product and services recommendations. Getting to know customers and solving their unique challenges helps sales teams win more opportunities and land larger deals. It also helps businesses reduce churn and nurture customer relationships.  

Unfortunately, when it comes to creating a customer-centric sales experience, not many organizations put the customer at the center of their sales process. Their CRMs are filled with data about the customer and little to no insight on the customer’s expectations, past conversations, buyer values, or win themes. Their processes are driven by opportunity tracking, internal goals, and persona templates – not true customer needs. It leaves closing the deal to guesswork and interpretation instead of capturing customer’s feedback. 

The Alchemer Sales Motion Optimizer Solution changes all this by putting the customer at the heart of the sales process. It helps you listen to your customers by capturing feedback at every stage, recording it, and embedding it into the systems you already use. By giving you the insights you need to truly understand your customer’s needs and how you can help solve their problems, you can personalize the sales motion process – creating the customized experiences that engage customers and close more deals.  

Enhancing the Sales Motion Process 

Jenny Lewis, Director of Sales for Enterprise Account Management at Alchemer, is passionate about building and mentoring high-performing sales teams. She has seen firsthand how traditional sales culture lacks customer focus.

“Too often, the sales motion process is one-sided and it’s about talking more than listening,” Jenny says. “We talk about who we are and what we can offer. We tell the customer how our sales process works and what will happen next. Yet, many salespeople fail to take into account who the customer is and what they need.” 

Determined to put the customer at the center of sales efforts at Alchemer, sales leadership is working closely with the company’s solutions team to put the Sales Motion Optimizer into action. “This is transforming our sales process,” explains Jenny. “It helps to ensure that we let the customer tell us what they need. This also helps us align our internal checkpoints around their goals. Not only can we demonstrate value once, but we’re able to build on it throughout the entire sales process.” 

The Sales Motion Optimizer is helping Jenny and the rest of the sales leadership team truly understand what our customers are looking for when buying our product. In turn, this helps to build a strong, effective sales team.  

The solution provides insights into both won and lost opportunities, which quickly uncover problem areas and coaching topics so that the sales leaders can effectively mentor their reps. Having this accurate, up-to-the-minute data and client information without ever having to leave Salesforce helps the sales reps save a significant amount of time. 

Benefits for New Business  

The solution is also positively impacting the new-business side of the sales team. Nolan Frazier, Director of Sales for New Business at Alchemer, believes that the Sales Development team is getting up to speed faster and providing more valuable customer insight when handing a lead off to a sales rep.  

“We needed to enhance our discovery stage and more accurately capture what the customer wants and needs,” says Nolan. “When we can see that a customer spent the time to fill out a pre-discovery call survey, we know they’re committed to attending the call. And we don’t have to guess at what they want and need, based on a phone call with a sales development rep.” 

Better data during the discovery stage is leading to a better prioritization of opportunities. In addition, as a customer transitions through the sales stages and handoffs between sales team members, there’s an exact record of the customer’s feedback and not an interpretation of it.  

Let Customers Tell You How They Want to Buy 

In today’s marketplace, a customer-focused sales motion process is imperative to success. According to a recent study, 89% of business customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. Gathering and acting on feedback is what makes this possible. Your response to what you learn proves to the customer that you are truly listening and want to solve their problems. 

From discovery to demos, closed-won/lost, to onboarding, the Sales Motion Optimizer collects your customer’s feedback across the entire sales process. It allows customers to tell you exactly how they want to buy and why, so you can meet and exceed their expectations.  

You get an exact transcript of the problems they are looking to solve, why they are interested in your product, and their decision-making criteria. You will know what’s going right and what’s going wrong every step of the way. And because the feedback is recorded in their own words within the CRM, nothing gets lost in translation. 

As a result, you have instant visibility into how each sale needs to evolve to best meet your customer’s needs. Armed with this knowledge, you can quickly gauge how to engage with customers, prioritize opportunities, and pinpoint areas of improvement. It also makes it easy for everyone on your team to follow the same, unified process. As the customer progresses through each stage, the sales rep knows exactly what process to follow and which assessment to send.  

Build a Single Source of Truth – and Integrate it with a CRM 

Having a single view of the customer goes a long way to support customer-engagement goals.  Yet in many organizations, customer data can be found scribbled on notepads, sitting in spreadsheets, or scattered across multiple platforms. The information that does make it into CRMs is often incomplete and incorrect.  

According to Lewis, “When a deal is lost, it can often be attributed to the salesperson misunderstanding the customer or not recording information correctly. With the Sales Motion Optimizer, this is no longer an issue.”  

The Sales Motion Optimizer includes a centralized Sales Portal that houses all the assessments and workflows out of a single repository. The Sales Portal can be integrated with a CRM, where all feedback is pushed immediately to the correct record. As a result, your sales team has access to clean, real-time data within the systems and processes they use every day.  

The integration with Salesforce’s CRM enables the Sales Portal to be embedded directly within the CRM, so sales reps never have to leave the platform to send an assessment or review feedback. With direct integrations and our REST API, the Sales Motion Optimizer can also integrate feedback with Microsoft Dynamics and other CRMs. 

Optimize Your Sales Motion Process Without Recreating the Wheel 

The Sales Motion Optimizer makes it easy to build a unified framework, so everyone on your team – salespeople, managers, and sales operations – are all on the same page. It also enables you to engage with your customers in the way they want to engage with you.  

With valuable insights at your fingertips, you can deliver hyper-personalized buying experiences to your customers – and this translates into more closed-won opportunities. Best of all, you don’t need to recreate your processes to make it happen. Configurable assessments, workflows, emails, and branding allow you to tailor the solution to meet your own sales stages and sales motion process.  

Implementation is easy too. The solution includes five hours of consulting from our professional services team so you will be up and running in just 30 days. To learn more about the Sales Motion Optimizer Solution, download the solution sheet, call 1-800-609-6480, or email your account manager or sales today. 

The post Ready to win more deals with larger price tags? It’s time to personalize your sales motion process. appeared first on Alchemer.

As an HR leader, creating a great place to work by improving the employee experience is at the heart of everything we do. It keeps employees engaged, productive, and loyal. It boosts productivity and enhances customer relationships. Our role and responsibilities as HR leaders must also align strategically with executive goals, and support the growth of the business. One study found that companies that invest in their employee experience see double the revenues and are four times as profitable compared to their less engaged counterparts.

Yet Human Resources teams are often spread thin. Responsible for the entirety of the employee experience – recruiting and retaining the very best people, developing meaningful benefits and rewards programs, providing professional development, and managing day-to-day employee needs – our plates are full.

When you add in the new demands of an elastic (heavily favored to remote) workforce, along with highly managed budgets and teams, building an employee-centric culture and great place to work just got exponentially more difficult.

The Employee Engagement Solution: An HR Success Story

At Alchemer, the employee experience is at the core of everything we do. We constantly strive to improve our employee experience because we know that happy and engaged employees perform better and that translates into a better experience for our customers and company growth. Just like many other HR teams, we are challenged to deliver this experience while balancing our budget and resources.

To find a better way to free up our time to focus on what really matters – building and maintaining a world-class employee experience – we enlisted the help of our Alchemer Solutions team. By listening to our customers in similar situations while exploring solutions to our own challenges, the Alchemer Employee Experience Solution was born.

The Employee Experience Solution streamlines some of HR’s most time-intensive tasks, allowing you to focus on employees and not on processing daily tasks. With pre-configured and customizable surveys, it makes collecting employee feedback easier than ever. It also includes the Employee Request Portal, which centralizes and automates the process of managing everyday employee needs.

To learn how to build a better employee experience, watch the free webinar.

Providing a Better Experience – For Both Employees and HR Teams

By improving our ability to collect continuous feedback, the Employee Experience Solution has made us a more nimble organization. We can easily leverage insights to act quickly, making incremental changes that net big results in driving our employee experience. Centralizing and automating the employee request process has given us the time-savings to improve our HR department operations.

For example, during the pandemic, we deployed the Employee Connection Pulse to our team, who were all working from home. The results told us that Alchemer people wanted more ways to connect outside of work meetings. Within a week, we were setting up game nights and a book club for those who wanted to join. With the Employee Experience Solution, you can achieve many of the same benefits. This out-of-the-box solution lets your HR team focus on what matters most – building a culture that fosters aligned, engaged, and productive people. Let me explain how.

Honing Your Feedback Skills 

Feedback is the backbone of any employee experience initiative. Yet too many companies relegate data collection to a once-a-year exercise and wait too long to make any meaningful changes. In comparison, we designed the Employee Experience Solution to help you capture the voice of your employees through continuous, meaningful feedback. From employee engagement to manager assessments to exit interviews, you’ll have the customizable surveys, workflows, and reporting to measure and improve your listening strategies throughout the employee lifecycle. 

A Common Scenario. Using the Core Employee Engagement Assessment each quarter, you can uncover key engagement drivers and areas of improvement. For example, if employees provide feedback that your benefits are confusing, you can work to develop educational resources about your offerings. If they would like more corporate transparency, you can collaborate with senior management to improve communications.   

The Employee Pulse then lets you evaluate these efforts, asking targeted questions that measure your progress against your benchmarks. Informing your work with real-time insights, this hones your efforts to improve experience faster and more efficiently.  

Taking Back Your Time Spent on Day-to-Day Needs 

We understand how employee requests can add up. It’s all too easy to become inundated by emails, texts, and phone calls from employees asking for everyday changes. These one-off requests not only take time but lack the visibility and adequate tracking mechanisms needed to manage them properly.

We built the Employee Request Portal to specifically address these issues. From request to review to implementation, this centralized hub streamlines the entire process and eliminates confusion from employees on the correct process to follow. If an employee wants to request a name change after getting married, they simply open the Employee Request Portal and fill out the appropriate request. A customized workflow immediately routes the request to HR for review and approval. Once approved, a notification is sent to the employee, automatically closing the loop. All requests are consolidated within Alchemer’s platform and the data collected can integrate with the HR systems you already have in place. This facilitates better tracking and reporting so nothing falls through the cracks.  

Launch Your Improved Employee Experience in 30 Days

You work hard to create a great place to work and to improve your employees’ experience. The Employee Experience Solution works to improve yours. With more effective feedback cycles, streamlined processes, and automated workflows, the demands on your team are significantly reduced. At the same time, your employees enjoy an improved experience. This empowers your people to become active participants in the organization while allowing your team to take on mission-critical initiatives that can transform your culture and your business.

The Employee Experience Solution lets you accelerate the launch of your new processes as well. We include six hours of onboarding coaching from our Professional Services group, so you’ll be up and running with your people-focused efforts in as little as 30 days.

For more information on the Employee Experience Solution, click here. 

The post Deliver on the Promise of Creating a Great Place to Work appeared first on Alchemer.

For overburdened information security teams, evaluating vendor and enterprise risks can quickly consume department time and budgets. Many organizations rely on a piecemeal approach, delivering one-size-fits-all assessments using a combination of PDFs, documents, and emails. This inflexible, time-consuming process is marred with issues and ends up frustrating both staff and vendors. Add in the time needed to calculate raw and residual scores manually, and you have the makings of an efficiency nightmare.  

While there are vendor and enterprise risk management tools available, their prohibitively high licensing fees and setup costs are hard to justify. What’s more, their functionality can be limited and inflexible, eating away at the very efficiencies information security teams hope to gain. 

A Solution in the Making 

Desiree Robinson, Director of Information Security and Compliance at Alchemer, was all too familiar with this reality. Determined to revamp the company’s risk-assessment program, she set out to develop a flexible and automated process so that her team could focus their efforts on managing and mitigating risks instead of being bogged down by manual risk evaluations and validations.  

To do this, she and our Solutions team leveraged the Alchemer platform’s inherent flexibility and functionality to design a more efficient process. This collaboration resulted in the Risk Assessment Solution: our comprehensive suite of pre-configured surveys with templated questions, workflows, and reports – all designed to streamline the process of identifying and reporting on vendor and enterprise risks. 

What Took Days and Weeks Now Takes Hours 

As a result, what once took days and weeks to complete now takes just hours, giving valuable time back to not only the information security, but also legal, procurement, IT, and other departments throughout Alchemer.   

With our Risk Assessment Solution, you can now take advantage of this same process. It allows you to operationalize risk feedback across your entire organization, making it easier to identify and assess risk – and to build a more robust information security program. 

A Look Under the Hood 

Allowing you to create your own flexible, repeatable process for capturing and evaluating risk companywide, the Risk Assessment Solution includes: 

Customized Third-Party Vendor Assessments. The sheer volume of vendor requests can tax valuable resources. And vendors can quickly become frustrated with blanket assessments that often include irrelevant questions. The Risk Assessment Solution eliminates both of these issues, so you can easily oversee the vendor request process for both internal requestors and vendors.  

Here’s how it works: When an employee wants to onboard a new vendor, they complete an Internal Vendor Request Assessment. The assessment is automatically sent to Information Security, where a customized vendor risk assessment is created and sent to the vendor based on their vendor type and risk level. Once completed, risk scores can be adjusted, creating an auditable trail of raw risk and residual risk for each vendor. 

Bottom-Up Enterprise Risk Assessments. Driving business priorities across the organization; the importance of your risk register cannot be overlooked. Yet, all too often, risk registers are built from the top-down, limiting visibility and accountability of risk management at all levels of the organization. 

With our Enterprise Risk Assessment, you can survey both risk owners and risk managers on identified risk types, allowing them to assign risk ratings.  

For example, you can assign Level 1 risk owners specific sections to complete. They, in turn, can assign sections to Level 2 risk managers. Adding more depth to the process, multiple risk owners and managers can also enter risk ratings for the same sections. As a result, you get a bottom-up view of risk that facilitates departmental accountability for risk mitigation within their areas. 

Going from Reactive to Proactive in 30 Days 

With pre-configured surveys, workflows, reports – and up to 10 hours of onboarding coaching from our Professional Services team – you’ll have everything needed to build a better risk assessment program in just 30 days. Your team can focus on being proactive, effectively managing, and mitigating risks to propel your business.  

For more information on how the Alchemer Risk Assessment Solution can help you perform vendor risk assessments in hours not days, click here. 

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