

Why Startups Like ZenPayroll Can Take On Giant Corporations like ADP And Win - AlexFeldy
http://blog.raddevelopment.io/why-startups-like-zenpayroll-can-take-on-giant-corporations-like-adp-and-win/

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nwenzel
I've used Paychex and ZenPayroll. ZenPayroll is awesome. No reason to ever
look back!

Great post on why startups can win.

Startups can win because the company cares more about their customers.

I'm sure plenty of people at large companies care about their customers. But a
large company's org structure separate the decision-makers from the front-line
employees. Any great customer-facing employee can add much more value to a
smaller company.

I'm also sure there are plenty of counter-examples of startups that didn't
provide great service. But that almost always past tense... small companies
that don't care about their customers don't last long.

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Rolpa
>Startups can win because the company cares more about their customers.

But you have to keep in mind the fact that it is rather easy to have that sort
of attitude when you're small and have a proportional number of customers -
it's much harder to be nice to a thousand people than to five. Scaling your
service with the size of your consumer base is the real key.

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micahroberson
True, but having up-to-date technology makes scaling service much, much
easier. ADP's problem is their service scales linearly with the number of
service reps on staff. That along with horrible communication across
departments(this is a tech problem in this day and age), and they suffer
because of it. Even if a tech-driven company like ZenPayroll gets the number
of customers ADP has, they will have scaled better because (hopefully) their
systems are prepared for the traffic from the beginning and they continuously
improve them to handle the growth. There's a massive difference between tech-
as-an-after-thought companies and the tech-driven startups like Zen.

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darren
We're an ADP customer and I'm shocked at the state of their technology.

Not only is their customer portal IE only, they mandate the use of an ActiveX
control from __1997 __. Proof:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiBRYxhCEAAWAg5.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiBRYxhCEAAWAg5.jpg)

Brutal. If this is the state of ZenPayroll's competition they're in a good
spot.

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herm
I agree, they obviously don't test what they roll out. It is very amateur,
updates look like they are pushed right into production given the obvious
nature of the bugs we have seen. They have multiple interfaces, when we were
testing it out we saw lookup data was inconsistent across interfaces, and
there was no built in customer validation of data. All data validation is done
by the end approver. They actually subcontract out most of the development
work, definitely not a modern technology driven solution.

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mikeryan
Seriously I've been using ADP for a year and a half and they've fucked it up
every time we've added an employee, we also found out at tax time that they'd
failed to withhold New York City income tax for our New York employees.
Considering proper tax withholdings is the primary reason to use a damn
payroll provider in the first place this was insane. I'd have switched to
Paychex (we have CA and NY employees which is why we needed a larger provider)
but everyone I talked to hate them too.

Ack! Just noticed ZenPayroll is now supporting NY, unfortunately we might be
moving all our HR to TriNet or I'd make the switch.

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goeric
If you've ever used Paychex or ADP then it's easy to know why ZenPayroll is
killing it.

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spinchange
Can't wait until these guys are nationwide.

