Q&A with Emily McEvilly, Workday’s First Chief Customer Officer

Before many of our customers deploy Workday, they reorganize their teams to support their new system. By aligning their internal organizations for a new way of operating, they set themselves up for success. At Workday, we do that too. As we continue to grow, we want to look for new ways to set up our teams to best support the needs of our customers. And as their needs evolve, how we help solve them has to change too.

Because of this, we’re bringing Professional Services, Education Services, Customer Success, and Customer Support together to form the new Workday Customer Experience organization. To lead this effort, Emily McEvilly has been named Workday’s first chief customer officer. In her nearly 10 years with the company, most recently as senior vice president of services, Emily has played an instrumental role in shaping the Workday customer experience.

We recently sat down to chat with Emily about why this new organization is so important to our customers’ continued growth.

Why is now the right time for Workday to create this new Customer Experience organization?

Today’s customers have a lot of options and expectations, and Workday has grown because we offer products and services that deliver on those expectations. In fact, since we started our executive sponsor survey in 2007, our customer satisfaction record has been 95% or higher every year.

However, we’ve heard from customers that they want us to continually raise our game. So we’ve decided to increase our investment in customer experience and reinvent how we serve them. This new organization positions our Sales, Support, Marketing, and Services teams to further serve the needs of our growing customer base at scale.

What will be the primary focus for Workday’s Customer Experience organization?

工作从来都不是about the software. It’s always been about customer experience. From the very beginning, Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield set out to build a company that would operate differently and provide an industry-defining customer experience. We’ll continue to expand this in the new Customer Experience organization.

By taking an outside-in approach, the Customer Experience team will focus on more effectively identifying and understanding the needs, opportunities, and challenges each of our customers face, and tailor solutions designed just for them, regardless of their size or location.

How is this approach different than what Workday has been doing?

It lets us set a vision for the organizations that impact customer experience, which include Marketing, Sales, Services, Product, and our Partner Ecosystem. Until now, all the teams at Workday have focused on driving improvements and initiatives for customers, but have done so on an organization by organization basis. Uniting these organizations through a single vision enables us to deliver a more seamless and impactful end-to-end journey for our customers.

We also asked customers for input on how they experience Workday and are using that feedback to identify areas we can improve. We did this via journey mapping sessions with groups of different customers. These helped us understand not only the variety of needs they face in their industries, location, and market, but also the critical factors they consider when choosing Workday and deciding what to deploy and adopt.

As Workday’s first chief customer officer, what are your core responsibilities?

I’m the chief advocate for our customers and how they experience Workday at every touchpoint. As a team, our goal is to help each customer adopt and use Workday with confidence so they experience the full value of their solution.

For example, if you were at either Workday Rising inOrlandoorMilan, you heard how we’re already making progress. Our customers have told us they need more help keeping up with all the new features and functionality we’re delivering. So we createdWorkday Success Plans. These are packages that provide a mix of education, tools, and expertise to empower customers to use Workday more effectively as their business evolves.

What excites you most about this role?

I want to see our customers have a long and fulfilling relationship with Workday, getting greater value out of our solutions and an excellent experience with our team. At Workday Rising a customer told me that when they deployed, she had a list of 40 things her company never had to do again. Every story I hear about how customers have consolidated operations, become more efficient, navigated an acquisition, or weathered a tough market makes me grateful to be in this new role.