Have you ever found yourself dissociating to relentlessly funkadelic “muzak” from the early 90’s while a man whose name is most certainly not ”John” asks his manager’s manager why the payroll management platform you paid someone else to use isn’t working?
Why is that your problem?
Let’s zero in on what’s happening here. You carefully vetted payroll providers, committed to one, and now you’re stuck on hold, listening to Kenny G, wondering where it all went wrong. What we’re looking at, here, is likely a matter of misaligned expectations.
It’s one thing to grab an oatmeal cookie from the free samples lady thinking it was chocolate chip; that doesn’t ruin your day. But when you carefully vet other cookies, whittling them down from a baker’s dozen until only one remains, wade through two to three months of delays and then you finally put that cookie in your mouth and it’s raisin?!?
That’s liable to get you the kind of angry that goes viral on TikTok after you wrestle a 65-year-old woman to the ground, get caught in her blue vest, and spend the rest of your life being called the “Cookie Monster”. Yeah, we got a little carried away with the metaphor. But the point still stands: you’ve invested a lot in your relationship with your payroll provider and it stings to not feel that reciprocated.
Lift HCM has managed payroll processing for businesses like yours and, with over fifty years in the game, we’ve boiled it down to a difference in the distinction between providers like ADP or Gusto treating you as…
- A customer…
- A client, or…
- A partner…
Let’s take a closer look all three terms to give you a better idea of whether or not it’s time to reassess your relationship with your payroll provider. Sorry about the cookie thing.
Gusto Expects You to Be Their Customer
You would be right to enter into a relationship with a self-service platform like Gusto as their customer. They built a fancy platform and you’re paying to use it and anything beyond that is where the relationship begins thinning out.
In these instances, your provider is there to facilitate your journey. Unfortunately, they’re probably not going to do a whole lot to guide that journey and they’re certainly not about to pave the way. “Kevin from Milwaukee” doesn’t love you like that. The “customer support” from these providers is focused on helping you use the tools you’ve paid to use, not achieve the results you want to use them for.
This model still works for a subset of companies. If you have a relatively straightforward pay structure and a team with a strong technical skill set who can navigate the addition of new employees to your payroll, Gusto might still meet your needs.
ADP May See You As a Client
While a heavy hitter in human capital management (HCM) like ADP may offer every service under the sun, your relationship will likely be limited to that of a client.
What do we mean by that?
Well, you’ll probably have a dedicated support rep, which sounds great. Their job extends beyond the role of “Randall from Missoula” (okay, “Randall”), but not by much. That’s because there’s a good chance your customer support rep has whisked away from their college quad, given a crash course in a behemoth software platform they’ll use to carry out your services, and plopped in front of a webcam before their graduation cap hit the floor. How efficient…for them.
What you often lack here is the wealth of knowledge and real-world experience you’d get from an industry veteran with specialized knowledge in their field. Now, to be fair, you might not always need this. An accountant at H&R Block still has the skills to get you money on your tax return, even if an elite Hollywood accountant can turn the collective budget of the Lord of the Rings trilogy into a loss (maybe magic really does exist).
Lift HCM Pulls Their Weight as a Partner
Partners differentiate themselves from your relationship as a client in that they’re equally motivated to progress towards a shared goal, which they take equal responsibility for achieving. This completely changes the dynamic of the relationship. More specifically, it shifts the role of a representative from that of a reactive resource to a proactive one.
What does that look like?
Well, for starters, they’re calling you. Let that one sink in. Nice, right? But wait, there’s more because they’re also going to apply their specialized knowledge and years of industry experience towards the unique and evolving set of goals and objectives they’ve identified in talking to you (some of which you may not have identified yourself!).
Odd as it may seem, you could comfortably characterize your relationship with a true payroll partner as easily being the most “human” of the three. Your victory is their victory. Your frustrations are their frustrations. And let’s not kid ourselves, and there will still be headaches (even if they’re few and far between). But managing payroll on your own can take up so much mental focus and drain so much of the emotional energy you could otherwise have invested in the business you’re passionate about. A lot of people find that having an empathetic teammate by their side goes a long way.
Will You Prioritize Partnership When Managing Your Payroll Provider?
We hope this gives you context for the frustrations you may have experienced with other firms. It’s also worth acknowledging that what may be a frustration for one company may not even ping the radar for another.
If you’re not sure whether a misalignment exists between your company and your payroll provider, you can learn more about the signs it’s time to make the switch. You can also read about how providers like ADP and Gusto compare on certain feature sets. For a better idea of how Lift HCM compares to a company like ADP, you can learn about the benefits of payroll companies who license out third-party software over using a proprietary tool.
Lift HCM is a family-owned payroll management firm that prides itself on maintaining multiple decades-long relationships with clients who have become like family to us. We’re happy to serve as an example of how beneficial it can be to find a partner prepared to grow by your side.
