Putting the Shine on our Customer Appeal: CakeHR Wins Appealie SaaS Customer Success Award

As the cherry on top of what has been an amazingly rewarding 2017, CakeHR finds place in the Appealie awards which honour excellence in SaaS

It is not everyday that a spunky start up stands on the same podium as stalwarts like Slack, Workday, Salesforce, Asana and Basecamp 😱

2017 SAAS AWARDS ANNOUNCED – APPEALIE HONORS 31 SAAS APPS
2017 SaaS Awards announced – Appealie honors 31 SaaS apps

But when it does, it gets the permission to party hard 🍾🎊🎉🎉🎉

That’s exactly what we did.

We just bought out the bubbly and had a love fest for our customers.

Because beyond numbers, beyond innovation and technical achievements, beyond content and marketing – Appealie celebrates a SaaS tools ability to delight users and drive their success.

Now it doesn’t get more human than that, right?

Success as a Service Mindset Moves Mountains

There are dozens of awards out there. In fact, we’ve won quite a few, including the Platinum Mouse (2014), repeated mentions as a Human Resource category leader by GetApp and the epithet of Rising Export Star by The Red Jackets (2017).

Receiving The Red Jacket as a rising export star
Receiving The Red Jacket as a rising export star

But Appealie strikes close to the heart. Because the tagline of this endeavour is “Apps users can’t live without”.

There is so much packed into that one line.

Winning an Appealie SaaS Customer Success Award means:

Our technology works and it works without overwhelm.

The adoption rate of CakeHR is atypical in the SaaS industry where one app is relegated to the corner for another, without thought.

We know how to create great applications. But we go beyond that and care about user success.

Our head of customer success Lee Chapman describes it as striving for “success as a service”. He says, “SaaS companies are always looking for the “aha!” or “wow” factor in the product. We’re all about “wowing” through the very first conversation. We’re a small team working on global success and this is why we are led to believe that SaaS is as much “success as a service” than software as a service.”

We at CakeHR dig deep to find customer pain points and then do our best to mitigate them – either through our solution or through the content on our award winning blog. We have a holistic approach to HR which makes us more than subscription software.

Our users feel they are a part of something greater.

It’s not all about finding a great Human Resource solution. It’s also about revolutionizing culture. We do seek reviews in much the same way as other brands. But the overwhelming support from our users and their vocal appreciation of CakeHR has to do with more than polite asking for feedback. With us customers feel empowered to make the most of their talent. They see a greater ROI from their biggest expense – their workforce. And the jubilation translates into spontaneous endorsements.

We want to thank Flip Group for not only talking about their Human Resource journey and their decision to choose CakeHR but also for sharing their insights on social. It is this genuine enthusiasm that bagged the Appealie.

The Appealie Selection Criteria

With a panel of experts that includes SaaS luminaries like the Director of Customer Success at Prosperworks, the Customer Experience Director at MeetEdgar and the Founder of Appealie, the selection criteria are anything but random.

  1. 15% of the decision hinges on app performance. The solutions that make the cut not only get the job done, they do so in critical settings and prove themselves reliable.
  2. 25% of the mix is customer success. Apps that can make users go “wow” are considered.
  3. Business value comes in at 20%. Appealie winners must be able to demonstrate quantifiable increase in bottom-line numbers for their customers. It is the acid test of an application’s viability.
  4. An additional 20% weight is given to user experience. Intuitive and seamless are the two adjectives that apply to Appealie vetted solutions. Nothing less will do!
  5. Last but not the least, 10% of the decision is based on the user interface. This stresses beauty and functionality keeping simplicity top of mind.
The Appealie Selection Criteria:
The Appealie SaaS Customer Success selection sriteria

You can find the full list of Appealie 2017 SaaS award winners here.

It is an impressive line up of innovators, enterprise leaders and growing businesses with heart.

The fact that HR management software CakeHR features prominently is a validation of our team’s dedication.

And reinforcement that believing SaaS stands for Success as Service can indeed move mountains.

Norberts.

Written By

Norberts Erts

HR Degen and Product Marketing Manager at Sage. Former Co-founder of HR software company CakeHR (acquired by The Sage Group plc in 2019). Keep a sharp eye on HR, marketing, business, finance, science, technology, and the connections between them.