IRIS Cascade

A Cascade to HR

Pros:

+ Requesting Holiday and viewing planner easy + Drop down menu to view all pages is easy way of navigating.

Cons:

- The click and drag method of booking holiday can be a little annoying and not work properly sometimes. - overall the look of the system is dated

Good product but appalling customer service

Comments: Cascade is a good product. It's self service functionality frees up resources and makes it easy for employees to manage their own holiday requests, expenses, TOIL etc. We have a complicated workforce and the ability to design your own pages is really useful to us and means that we can easily set up, record and report on important HR issues for example recording which employees have had their Covid vaccination so we can plan safer working environments. Unfortunately the big problem with Cascade is it's appalling customer service. We have had 5 different account managers in as many years all who are impossible to contact and very illusive when you have issues that need resolving. A number of years ago Cascade asked their customers to suggest improvements to the system via their customer portal. At the time this was a great forward thinking thing to do. Unfortunately only a very, very, small percentage of these have been addressed whereas most others haven't. Therefore there are clear identified problems with the system that Cascade haven't addressed. For example if an employee changes line manager any outstanding requests do not move over to the new line manager and therefore go into limbo and cannot be approved. Similarly, if an employee reduces their working hours or changes their working days during the year, any holiday already booked is not adjusted accordingly. This actually created extra work to rectify and simple things that an HR system should do.

Pros:

Easy to create bespoke pages User friendly

Cons:

Dreadful customer service. Trying to get hold of anyone is impossible. Clunky and confusing back office administration New UI doesn't look good (very grey and boring) Do not listen to their customers (improvement suggestions from multiple customers ignored for over 3 years) Key functionality not supported which creates more workload Expensive

Since IRIS acquired Cascade, we have not been able to speak with our account manager for months?

Pros:

First year of cascade, our customer service was effective and very good.

Cons:

First year of cascade, our customer service was effective and very good. Since IRIS acquired Cascade, its absolutely impossible to get hold of anyone via email. Due to this lack of customer service, we were offered a discount at the time of renewal. In addition, we also requested a 50 licence reduction as these were not being used. These two aspects have not been incorporated in our latest invoice. We have the credit control team chasing payment for an invoice that's not updated and is £3,000 more expensive than agreed. I am emailing the HR Renewals, 2 account managers and the Credit Control team since APRIL!! We are now at the end of JUNE! No one replies! I have sent 5 emails stating that this invoice is wrong and that we need a revised one as per the terms agreed. Meanwhile, no one replies and we keep being chased for payment. We will not be renewing and we do not recommend this product at all. Its clunky, the reporting function is adaptable to a degree and always requires extensive manual input. However, all of these aspects would be considered somewhat part of a system like this. The issue here is really the absolute lack of customer service. Again, MONTHS!! and no reply.

IRIS Cascade - good but requires some improvements

Pros:

All of the features that you'd want from a HR management tool are there and for the HR department the access and reporting are all critical features that work well. Payroll reporting works very well and saves a lot of manual time each month.

Cons:

The UI could be a lot better, users tend to be confused and overwhelmed by it when first logging onto Cascade. In addition there is no API features to get data in/out which should be critical in a product like this in 2022.

Workhorse, but dated

Comments: It doesn't break or lag; has ability to support complex use case. Ok for tech-savvy person to get the hang of pretty quickly. Not as visually appealing to use as it could be, some technical obstacles requiring help from IT.

Pros:

Allows simple to complex use of the platform to develop websites. Multiple users can easily edit sites without conflicts. The user interface is pretty easy to figure out once you work with it a bit, uploading images, and editing.

Cons:

It's a bit clunky. Setting up modules for pages is not in plain language--for me it requires IT to set up all the functionality. Jargon used is not intuitive for the average user for those functions.