Published by isobel.regan@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 17.04.2023 
About Applaud
Applaud was founded in 2008 by Ivan Harding and Duncan Casemore after they met while working at Oracle. Throughout their journey, the two have always been driven by a mission to create digital employee experiences fit for tomorrow.
We revel in showing businesses what is possible when it comes to providing the best digital employee experience (EX) for their workforce. Employees deserve to have a consumer-grade experience, so we help businesses achieve this by optimising their existing HR technology, helping them save valuable time and money without having to hire developers or move to a whole new system.
Our Entry
In our entry for SaaS Product of the Year, we shared with the judges some of the challenges we have faced as a business over the last year, and how we have overcome them. One such challenge was how much the EX market industry has changed over the last few years as more big players have entered the field. This is more competition for us, but we have continued to produce product updates which have helped us to stay ahead of emerging solutions.
When developing our platform, we knew we needed a system that could easily connect with as many enterprise systems as possible. A requirement for our development team was therefore to create an EX platform where users could connect their existing best-of-breed tools without the need to learn code themselves.
Due to how budgets are in 2023, businesses are focused on critical investments that deliver ROI and we need to give our customers the tools to measure this. We do this by mapping out the true costs of archaic processes and demonstrating how Applaud can help organisations optimise and ultimately make huge savings in these areas.
We then went on to explain what sets Applaud apart from the rest and why we should win. This was no small feat while sticking to a word count, but we were incredibly pleased to be able to share what makes Applaud shine. One of these reasons was that our no-code platform means less IT expertise is required and allows organisations to set up, use and update technology significantly faster. What sets us apart from competitors is how this is all elevated by our best-practice template library, which allows Applaud’s customers to deliver a greater level of personalisation and automate processes easily. Customers can tap into templated journeys ranging from onboarding to employee feedback or create their own with just a few clicks.
What a Win Would Mean to Us
Winning this award at the Global Business Tech Awards would mean a considerable amount to us, as it demonstrates our continued commitment to being a best-in-market solution for our customers and prospective customers. As we shared with the judges in our entry, the employee experience market is fast becoming a crowded place where we were once the sole voice championing EX. To continue to win awards for our EX platform, despite bigger players entering our market such as Microsoft, shows that Applaud’s history, knowledge, and commitment to the employee experience market continues to resonate with everyone that interacts with us.
