The team at 15Five, the strategic performance management platform that drives action and impact, knew they needed to provide HRIS integrations for their product.

“Many of our customers consider an HRIS integration to be one of the most important criteria when choosing a tool like 15Five", explains Laura Cristobal Boyer, a Senior Product Manager at 15Five. In addition, 15Five knew the integrations could play a pivotal role in enhancing their customer experience, which, in turn, would allow them to improve customer retention. 

This led them to build integrations through their in-house developers and a 3rd-party solution. However, they quickly ran into issues with both approaches.

Their 3rd-party solution lacked responsive customer support, failed to provide visibility on issues, proved inflexible, and required significant technical expertise to use; all the while, their native integrations consumed a lot of their developer and technical support resources and took a long time to bring to market.

On top of each individual approach's drawbacks, combining them led to issues. “Every time there was an integration issue, our support team would have to figure out if it was from a native integration or from the 3rd-party tool. Based on that information, they’d then have to figure out the steps for troubleshooting the issue. Over time, this was a pretty painful process for our support team.”

15Five knew they needed another 3rd-party tool and, just as important, a single place to review and manage their integrations. Once their team came across Merge and started experimenting with it through Merge’s free Launch plan, they knew they had found the right solution.

Using Merge, 15Five was able to take 10 HRIS integrations live, including UKG, ADP, and BambooHR.

Through these integrations, they were able to implement a variety of syncs: 

• Any time a user is added to the HRIS, they’re added to 15Five, along with any of the associated fields a client wants to sync.
• Once a user’s status is marked as inactive in the HRIS, they’re automatically deprovisioned in 15Five.
• Whenever a user is updated in the HRIS, the corresponding changes can occur in the user’s 15Five profile (depending on the fields that are modified in the HRIS).

The integrations have allowed the team at 15Five to sync fields like first name, last name, contact information, department, and birthday, as well as more unique fields that individual clients need via Field Mapping.  

Nathan Baldwin, an Engineering Manager at 15Five, provides additional context: “If a client has a particular property that isn’t supported by Merge’s Common Models, we can usually still bring that data into 15Five easily and quickly through Merge’s Field Mapping feature.” 

With accurate and comprehensive employee data living in 15Five, their users can slice and dice the various types of data 15Five collects, whether that’s related to employee engagement or performance. This allows their users to access more granular, actionable insights they wouldn’t find otherwise. 

The team at 15Five also recently used the HRIS integrations to help power their newly-launched “HR Outcomes Dashboard”—which allows HR leaders to review the company’s performance and progress in terms of retention, engagement, and turnover via scores. “Using the HRIS integrations, we’re able to sync employee turnover data, which allows us to provide consistently up-to-date turnover scores in this dashboard”, explains Laura.

The team at 15Five has been able to consolidate nearly all of their integrations into Merge, allowing their support team to diagnose issues much more easily and quickly on behalf of clients. 

Merge’s Integration Observability features, which automatically diagnose issues and provide suggested remediations, coupled with Merge’s support team, have also helped accelerate 15Five’s support team’s time to resolution.

Laura explains that “When any integration issues come from Merge, we’re able to address them 4 days faster on average than issues that come from native integrations or the other 3rd-party tool we’ve relied on”.

In addition, the platform has allowed their team to scale their integrations more effectively. Laura  adds additional context, stating that “By allowing us to both build multiple integrations with a single API and debug integration issues easily through Merge’s backend and support team, I can confidently say that our development cycle timelines for integration-related activities have been cut in half (if not more).”

Clayton January, the Head of Partnerships at 15Five, sums up the benefits they’ve experienced from leveraging Merge strategically: 

“Partnering with Merge has enabled our product team to launch critical integrations at scale, delivering outsized value to our customers. Moreover, the collaborative support we've received from their team over time attests to their high-performance standards that have made them a market leader.”

While we’re proud of the results we’ve been able to help deliver for 15Five up to now, we’re even more excited about where our partnership is headed!