I recently sat down with Duncan Casemore, Co-Founder & CTO of Applaud HR, to discuss how their HR service delivery (HRSD) suite is changing the employee experience landscape. For years, HR technology has focused primarily on making life easier for HR service representatives and help desk staff, with employee experience as a secondary consideration. Applaud flips this approach on its head by building HR tech entirely around the employee experience.
A Fresh Take on HR Service Delivery
Founded in 2008 by Duncan Casemore and Ivan Harding, Co-Founder and CEO, Applaud began with a simple philosophy: HR tech should revolve around employees. The company has evolved from its initial Oracle-focused plugins to a comprehensive, vendor-agnostic HR service delivery platform.
What sets Applaud apart in the crowded HR tech landscape is its approach. While most service delivery tools start with case management focused on the HR support team, Applaud started with tier-zero self-service for employees. As Casemore explains, “A lot of vendors still license their software by agent, which is sort of telling in terms of what they really care about.”
With 70+ customers spanning industries from financial services to healthcare to technology, Applaud serves mid-to-enterprise organizations (5k-100k employees) that typically operate globally with complex HR tech environments.
The Employee-First Difference
Traditional HR service delivery starts with case management — tracking tickets, managing SLAs, and routing inquiries. This approach centers on the “back-end efficiency” of the HR support team. Applaud deliberately took the opposite approach, focusing first on creating an exceptional tier-zero experience that empowers employees to find what they need without creating tickets at all.
The impact of this approach is significant. As Casemore points out, “Case management tools are great, but they don’t really reduce your case volume. It just means that you get the same number of inquiries in a different format.”
By contrast, Applaud creates a seamless entry point to an employee’s entire HR world, bringing together fragmented systems and services in one intuitive interface. The goal is to make an employee’s work life “less confusing, less frustrating,” while simultaneously reducing the burden on HR teams.
A Complete HR Service Delivery Suite
Applaud’s platform consists of five core modules, all powered by its Creator Growth Platform:
HR Portal
Serves as the “home of HR,” bringing together everything an employee needs in one place. This addresses a growing challenge Casemore identified: “HR has become a bit homeless in recent years. They used to have their intranet on SharePoint, but that’s deteriorating and lost in Teams these days.”
AI Assistant
Acts as a personal HR helper available 24/7. Built from the ground up using generative AI, it accesses knowledge from across the organization to provide instant, personalized answers.
Knowledge Management
Empowers employees with instant answers while helping HR teams identify content gaps and improve knowledge quality. AI scores content on readability, engagement, relevance, and originality.
Journeys
Makes key moments — from onboarding to exit — more rewarding by providing guided experiences. Unlike traditional onboarding focused on compliance and form-filling, Applaud’s journeys emphasize cultural integration and manager support.
HR Case Management
Their newest addition, AI-Native HR Case Management, provides intuitive, streamlined HR support for those instances when self-service isn’t enough.
AI at the Core
Applaud’s approach to AI isn’t just a feature – it’s fundamental to how the platform operates. The AI Assistant acts as a “chat GPT for work” but with access to all HR knowledge content, HR data (where permitted), and learning resources. The platform also supports specialized AI assistants for specific use cases, such as a “bias buster agent” that can review job specs or performance reviews, and a “mind mate” for interactive wellbeing check-ins.
What makes this particularly powerful is how the AI helps both employees and HR teams. For employees, it provides instant, personalized answers. For HR, it analyzes knowledge gaps, recommends content improvements, and provides insights into what employees are actually looking for.
A survey of end-users rated Applaud’s AI Assistant consistently at over 90% for clarity of responses, accuracy, and relevance—impressive metrics for any AI implementation.
Real-World Impact
The real test of any HR technology is its impact on organizations. One global medical technology company with 18,000 employees, provides a compelling example. After implementing Applaud:
- They exceeded their annual ticket reduction target in just four months
- They reduced 9,000 tickets in four months (their annual target)
- They achieved minimum annual savings of $500,000
- Usage, adoption, and NPS metrics all exceeded expectations
This isn’t an isolated case. A global financial services company reduced HR queries by 8% by streamlining their onboarding process from 21 different touchpoints (6 emails, 4 links, 11 wiki pages) to a single email directing new hires to Applaud.
The Power of No-Code Customization
Underlying Applaud’s modules is what they call the Creator Growth Platform—a no-code environment that allows HR teams to customize and extend the solution without writing a single line of code.
As Casemore describes it, it’s a creative platform where you can build your own mini-apps inside it. This capability enables HR teams to continuously innovate and adapt their tier-zero experience to meet evolving needs.
Looking Forward
As HR teams face increasing pressure to do more with less while improving employee experience, solutions like Applaud that reduce friction while empowering employees become increasingly valuable.
What’s particularly notable is Applaud’s AI-first approach. While many vendors are retrofitting AI into existing solutions, Applaud has built its platform with AI at its core — something that will likely become the standard for HR tech moving forward.
For organizations with complex, fragmented HR technology landscapes looking to create a more intuitive employee experience while reducing support costs, Applaud offers a compelling option worth exploring.
