Last week, I had an opportunity to receive a briefing from isolved. I was quite impressed by what I learned as I must admit that I needed clarification about their market presence, breadth of product, and focus on customer support. The last point I have always said is the glue that is so important when considering a solution provider. Technology is great but strong customer support is necessary to be successful.
They were conceived 37 years ago with the inception of COBRA. They started as a benefits provider to provide services around COBRA, FMLA, and other insurance management. They focused on Core HR including payroll and benefits but have since invested in developing their platform into a full suite that includes Talent Acquisition, HR and Payroll (including benefits administration), Workforce Management, and Talent Management with a focus on user experience.
By the numbers
- They currently serve over 7 million employees across 177,000 customers
- They process $119B in payroll and taxes annually
- Revenue retention in 2023 was 110%
Who do they serve?
They serve the small to midsize market in the USA. Small is defined as 5 to 49 employees and mid-50 to 500 employees. They have now been serving small enterprise customers - defined as 500 to 2,500 employees.
Notably, their direct sales efforts in the small enterprise market have seen a growth of 23% over the past 12 months and I expect that their presence in this market will continue to grow.
Ongoing investment in industry solutions
This is key for isolved as they grow. Currently, they have investments in:
- Manufacturing, Construction & Engineering
- Hospitality, Hotels and Restaurants
- Staffing, Tax, HRO, and Business Services
- Healthcare Services
The Promise of isolved
They have a strong commitment to customer support and user community engagement and live by the core value that they want to be a trusted partner for their customer and be seen as an extension of their client HR team.
Customer Support
Availability is blindingly quick, their average speed to answer a customer call over the past 12 months was <22 seconds while they managed to answer 96% of all calls within 90 seconds over the past 12 months. This is a significant improvement from the industry average of 90 minutes. On top of quick responsiveness, 85% of all calls were closed in less than 8 hours in the past 12 months.
The importance of company culture and internal treatment of employees
Customer support is only achievable if the company itself embraces a great company culture. Notably, the turnover rate at the company is less than 16% in the last year. 84% of employees believe that people care about each other at the company. This allows isolved to create transformational employee experiences at both micro and mid-market levels.
The teams that isolved have assembled to support you (coined Sidekicks), support you at every level. They aspire to operate as a trusted, true partner and an extension of your HR team. 75% of the isolved employees are focused on servicing customers and developing solutions, which is good news. By working with you, they discover new ways to be able to help you and can learn how they could help you down the road with product and service enhancements. Last year 33% of all product enhancements came from their customers.
Community Engagement
They have coined the term People Heroes for the people leaders of their customers. Supporting these People Heroes is deep and wide. They do this by providing various support vehicles:
- People Heroes University - offers a deep library of resources including Articles, Recorded webinars, Clock/release guides, Quick help videos, and ~80,000 courses.
- People Heroes Community - a customer support network with over 10,000 peers that allows you to source advice from fellow isolved customers. It includes self-serve for common questions. Community members can share their isolved experiences too – accepting challenges for speaking opportunities and more to help grow their professional brand too.
- People Heroes Tour - isolved is visiting ~25 cities in the USA this year (nearing 100 cities since the roadshow series launched in 2022) to get close to their customers. These are free half-day events for isolved customers that include HR topics that matter most, In-depth table time with CSMs, People Hero success stories, Networking table topics, and SHRM CE credits.
Focused on Customer Outcomes
They are focused on customer success which includes people outcomes as well as business outcomes. They believe that helping their customer achieve more is their secret for success.
People Outcomes include:
- Attract &Retain Top Talent
- Compliance
- Productivity
- HR Efficiency
- Award-winning Culture
Business Outcomes include:
- Customer Satisfaction
- Profitability
- Innovation
- Competitive Advantage
What's new in product development?
The isolved People Cloud is getting regular investment - below are 2 areas of note
AI
AI is being integrated across various functions, including recruiting and daily HR inquiries, to improve efficiency. They aim to provide personalized recommendations and improve decision-making across the suite. Have a look below to see what they are tackling with AI.
Recruiting Automation - Make sourcing easier with candidate-to-job matching and speeding up the job description authoring process with ChatGPT
Always-On HR in the Flow of Work - Automated responses to frequently asked questions from the employee handbook and People Heroes University
isolved Better Benefits™ - Recommendation engine suggests health plans based on machine learning around demographic metadata
isolved Perfect Payroll™ - Help payroll administrators catch payroll errors before they occur yielding improved accuracy, compliance, and time savings
Personalized Learning Experiences - Create personalized pathways by matching employees to relevant learning and development content
Analytics
ROI Dashboard that assigns a value to the return on investment of using isolved, for things like payroll savings, retention, savings, and more.
A
KPI Dashboard refreshes the current Executive Dashboard, showing the most important metrics for the leadership team,
New analytics features include:
Benchmark Analytics - that takes advantage of anonymized data collected across customers to help you review salary, benefit, turnover, and more vs isolved benchmarks.
Compensation Management - is design and manage compensation plans from budget creation to reward allocations.
There is more to come later this year and into 2025.
My take
isolved has invested heavily in its user experience, building a system centered around employee engagement and community. In addition, their focus on being an extension of their client’s HR is a great move. They value customer satisfaction and loyalty and that seems evident in their 110% retention rate.
They offer a full suite of features normally not seen as an offering for small to mid-sized businesses and have an aggressive roadmap to continue to develop their platform. I do believe that they can move to sell to larger companies in the 500 to 2,500-employee space. If they can keep their eye focused on the customer experience as they move up, they will undoubtedly find more and more success.
