From Capital to Experience…..a new era in HR technology.

With the recent rebranding of HCM changing to HXM at SAP, I think most of us can agree that the idea behind innovation in the employee experience can only mean good things for our users of SuccessFactors. What we’ve been told by SAP is that “we will stop defining our people as interchangeable assets. Instead, we must care as much — or more — about our employees as we do our customers. HXM pushes HR processes and decisions to go beyond simply facilitating transactions to truly reinventing employee experiences in ways that accelerate business growth.” (Tomb, 2019)

SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics is of course a big deal and from what we know about Qualtrics’ capabilities leveraging experience data and its focus on employee and product feedback (taking the acquisition fee aside), who can blame SAP for giving this the big push in letting us know how this is going to improve the experience of all our employees and users of SuccessFactors!

However, us SAP SuccessFactors delivery consultants out there on the coal face are itching to know what this really means for us and what we can tell our customers. Without delving into the details of the articles, so far, we’ve seen a total rephrasing of HCM to HXM on all SAP SuccessFactors reference material and some hints in future releases that may include improvements to the user experience with Home page redesign investigation and implementation.

It is this improvement to the user experience that was shown on a prototype demo at the last November’s HXM Digital Summit event which probably gives us the best insight so far as to how powerful the integration of Qualtrics into SAP SuccessFactors can be. Below we can see how our homepages may look in the near future with the focus on utilising a new AI like search tool at the centre stage to obtain easy access to all functions and data as opposed to performing multiple clicks navigating through menus or non-contextual searches.

Some of us who have used SAP’s support portal when raising support incidents recently may have already seen how this new search can perform. In the prototype demo, we were shown how the new search can perform like a virtual assistant:

After asking SuccessFactors “how do I give a great presentation?”, SuccessFactors would be able to provide items in the search result from across the suite such as courses in LMS on improving presentation skills and even returning job profile data and suggesting possible colleagues with matching skills and location:

And even expanding the search further by asking for more colleagues with the same skills, and even adding a workshop to their goals.

With so many customers stressing the importance of their employees having the ability to access data and functions with the least clicks, the virtual assistant like search that SAP SuccessFactors will offer in the future should meet this necessity. Let’s hope that such intelligent automation capabilities will come to reality soon in the near future releases of SuccessFactors.

For any questions or comments in relation to this article, please feel free to send me an e-mail at Ash Waldron.

Ash is a senior SAP HR SuccessFactors consultant and has been working in the HR world for over 14 years across multiple industries and sectors. He is an expert in both SAP HR & SuccessFactors, specialising in Employee Central and Talent Management.