TALiNT Partners spoke to Mark Kieve, CEO of Pixid, about how its approach to customer success won a TIARA Talent Tech Star Award last year – and why recruiters should recognise their back-office teams.
Customer success management has become an important differentiator for talent tech providers as both employers and recruiters look beyond adoption to integration and orchestration. The legacy of lockdown is a keener understanding of how tech and data can improve all aspects of HR and recruitment – but only if you know how to make the most of it. As recruiters have invested in digital transformation to automate more – and enable a wider range of high value, advisory services – talent tech providers are offering more end-to-end solutions to build and manage their candidate and contractor communities. Pixid has focused on customer success as a differentiator – and very successfully. In 2022, Pixid won the TIARA Talent Tech Star Award for Client Service with judges praising “its impressive client retention, referral rates and its investment in staff development that has enabled great customer service.”
Customer success is about building long-term relationships with our staffing agency and MSP clients and supporting and training their end clients
“Customer success is about building long-term relationships with our staffing agency and MSP clients and supporting and training their end clients,” says Mark Kieve, CEO of Pixid. “Our business model is built around ensuring satisfaction with our system, critical as we have a transactional based charging model. We provide training and materials at multiple levels to enable users to make the most of our platform at no cost.” Pixid was founded in 2004 by Adecco, Randstad and Manpower to provide a vendor management system (VMS) to support the complex French temporary staffing market. Following a private equity backed management buyout in 2015, Pixid became completely independent from its founders. With its new found independence, Pixid has significantly grown, and its VMS is no w deployed to over 130,000 client locations by 8,500 agency branches, enabling the management of 250,000 worker assignments daily.
“Through our collaborative approach, we have effectively enabled the advantages of a VMS, usually reserved for large accounts, to be rapidly deployed, with a transactional charge basis and on a cross-border, multi -currency and multi -lingual basis,” adds Mark. “Our full two-way integration with Bullhorn has further boosted the potential for Pixid VMS to deliver great service for MSPs, staffing agencies and their clients.” Speaking on a panel at TALiNT Partners’ Growth Lunch & Learn in Dublin on 20th April, Mark observed that the integration of solutions like Pixid on marketplaces like Bullhorn are not only levelling the playing fi eld for SME agencies developing project and mid-market RPO, they’re helping staffing fi rms to expand their offering internationally as well. “Integration with front and back-end systems such as Bullhorn make a difference,” he explained. “This gives staffing fi rms the agility and the ability to quickly deploy a platform to meet the needs of clients for non-complex projects and the scalability to accommodate growth – sometimes on a multi -country basis.”
Smarter use of data
A key theme at this growth event was the increasing use of analytics by recruiters to become more trusted advisors on workforce planning and a range of solutions. This is another area of differentiation for talent tech providers like Pixid. “We provide robust data analytics and reporting through our BI module, which helps staffing firms make data-driven decisions to improve efficiency and profitability,” adds Mark. “We help our agency clients use data to report not just on what they are doing but on what their end-client is doing too. By providing support for all these customer success elements, we help staffing fi rms optimise their technology and data usage, driving greater efficiency, cost savings and, ultimately, better results for our agency clients and their end clients.”
Back office champion
In 2023, Pixid is championing the support that underpins growth for agencies as a campaign partner of the TIARA Recruitment Awards UK & Ireland and sponsor of the Business Services Team of the Year Award – which recognises an exemplary services team within any staffing back-office function that has best supported growth, enabled innovation or improved performance. “Back-office teams are often the unsung heroes in recruitment, from credit control to marketing to compliance, all of which have proved how vital they are to profitable growth in recent years,” said Mark. “Pixid is proud to sponsor the Business Services Team of the Year Award to recognise the contribution of one team’s impact or how different support teams have collaborated to improve productivity, profitability, client loyalty or candidate engagement.”
Having successfully navigated the TIARA Talent Tech Star Awards as a finalist and winner with Pixid, Mark will see it as a judge on the TIARA Recruitment Awards this year. So what will he be looking for from the top recruiters shortlisted? “The best balance of tech and talent to deliver improvement but also how teams are uniting behind a shared purpose and goal – whether it’s to be the best recruiter in its market specialism or to transform recruitment with new models, solutions or approaches.” Pixid has been shortlisted again this year for the TIARA Talent Tech Star Awards, for Client Service and Workforce Solution of the Year. How is Pixid enabling transformation and adapting to the changing recruitment market to deliver more value to staffing and talent solutions clients? “We will continue our significant investment in R&D, exploring new features, technologies and innovations while staying ahead of industry trends. This will involve embracing new and emerging technologies, including AI. We’ll also be facilitating seamless integrations with further back and front office systems for streamlined workflows across multiple platforms,” Mark confides. “In addition, we will continue our expansion into new markets, where the demand for mid-market VMS solutions indicates good growth potential, while continuing to offer the comprehensive customer support and training resources to maintain long-term client relationships.” Customer success and back-office support are the new battlegrounds for vendors looking to differentiate, increase loyalty and build the foundations for resilient and profitable growth.
