Startup Circle: How is Benepik helping brands in driving Channel Partner Loyalty

Employee engagement is a timeless priority for any business. “When companies can get it right, the positive impact echoes across the whole organization. While that hasn’t changed, employee engagement now must adapt to the most significant shift in the workplace that’s happened in our generation - the Global COVID-19 pandemic,” states Saurabh Jain, Founder and CEO, Benepik.

In an interaction with CiOL, Jain talks about the HR landscape, the factors driving the sector and about his Venture - Benepik. Excerpts:

Q. What are the drivers/market trends that are shaping the HR landscape in 2021?

Employee wellbeing takes the spotlight

One of the best ways to support them is to let them choose what health and wellness mean to them. It includes providing tools to monitor and maintain one's health by tracking and informing users on different wellness matters. It can be on physical movement, calorie intake, sleep patterns, fitness regime as well as personalized wellness alerts. Additionally, give employee’s flexibility and autonomy whether it’s a meditation session, therapy consultation, running shoes, exercise equipment, nutritious meal delivery or anything else.

Revamping Onboarding

The onboarding process and technology must encompass the end to end experience – right from Offer management to joining formalities to the Day 1 employee experience. Giving new employees everything they need to get started reduces the effort required from HR. Providing them with insights about the company culture also helps companies increase new joiner engagement.

Consumerization of HR

The movement towards personalization in technology is defined as the “Consumerization of HR”. By creating a social, mobile, and consumer-style employee experience, companies can build an environment wherein employees do not hesitate to bring their whole selves to work.

Configurable Platforms

The Employee Engagement platforms would evolve to have seamless integration & configuration with other tools such as Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft teams etc providing employees’ one single platform to have all the tools needed.

Q. Tell us more about Benepik and its offerings.

Benepik is an engagement company focussing on Employees, Channel Partners and Customers. We offer an integrated Employee Experience solution including Communication, Rewards, Recognition, Learning, Wellness and Pulse Survey.

We also offer digital onboarding solutions to seamlessly begin the new hire journey while working from anywhere. The Onboarding solution not only focuses on paperless joining formalities but also drives new joiner engagement and cultural integration. Further, our offerings also include a Channel Partner Loyalty solution that combines two-way communication between brands and channel partners with personalized rewards and transparent pay-outs. Brands can track revenues at the retailer/ influencer level and can run targeted campaigns and drive product awareness among their partners.

Q. How is Benepik helping Brands in driving Channel Partner Loyalty?

For decades, Channel Managers and Marketing Heads have primarily used incentives to yield sales. While this might be successful in the short term, it does not lead to a long-term sense of affiliation with the brands. As Brands are looking for novels ways to boost partner performance, the brands must focus on the followings:

Create Sense of Belonging and Not Just Rewards

Most Channel Loyalty Programs are only about earning points. They create the least loyal partners who are mostly interested in claiming the reward. Our Loyalty program provides a platform for open dialogue where Channel Partners have the opportunity to express their feedback and ideas openly. By providing timely and contextual communication Channel Partners should feel informed, supported, and valued.

Partner Behavioural Insights

Benepik helps brands analyse Behavioural Metrics such as Engagement Rate, Retention, Content Consumption, Click-Through Rates, Opt-ins and Drop-offs. Based on these metrics and individual motivators, companies can deliver a more personalized experience to Channel Partners for a better end-user experience.

Engage through Gamification

Traditional loyalty programs utilize the ‘points’ methodology solely based on volumes. With our platform, brands can also leverage Gamification to reinforce desired behaviours including Volumes, Service Levels, Responsiveness, Relationship and Retention Rate.

Build Partner Capabilities

Customer experience is the new competitive battleground. The brands must focus on Effective collaboration, knowledge transfer and training of Channel Partners, thus enriching the customer experience.

Q. What are some of the innovative employee engagement techniques/ strategies that organizations can employ to communicate with their employees seamlessly?

I believe that organizations must embrace three attributes - purpose, potential, and perspective. These will allow them to humanize work to create lasting value for their workers, their organizations, and society at large. Some of the ways through which organization can foster these are:

Creating a Sense of Belongingness

Strive for a workplace culture in which individuality is both noticed and valued. Workplace support, understanding and trust all increase the likelihood of an individual feeling more connected to the organisation.

Recognizing and Rewarding

Making it a habit to acknowledge employee’s efforts can be a big game-changer for your employee’s morale. Further, Forbes reports, nearly 90% of employees who feel appreciated by their manager tend to have higher levels of trust in that team leader.

Evolve through Learning

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation at an unprecedented level, which has resulted in the widening skills gap. Learner’s time is limited, so adaptive learning is super important. That means learning “on the go” with short, engaging, and impactful content accessed in micro-moments – on the train on the bus, or during breaks – without interrupting daily workflow to equip them.

Career Planning

When Employees Own Their Careers, Everyone Wins. ‘To make employees ownership of their career’ is more than an empty phrase. Companies must provide employees and managers with the concepts, tools and practice they need to make it work.

Feedback

Individual behaviours are the basis of engagement in the workplace. By getting the pulse of the team using a real-time data tracking system, also provides a deep insight into how employees feel every day, based on their work performance, or their interactions with management and colleagues.

Q. How can organizations measure the ROI of the same?

While measuring the ROI of engagement, it is crucial to recognize that engagement is a result of the company’s culture. It’s difficult to measure company culture as assigning a quantitative quality to a concept unique to each company is challenging. However, quantifying a qualitative characteristic is easier than it seems; organizations can identify specific qualities that determine their culture and assign metrics to them. They can then use this model to prioritize their engagement strategy based on how employees feel about different parts of their culture.

Q. What are your growth priorities for 2021?

Our development centre is located in Gurugram and we have a sales network across Delhi NRC, Bangalore & Mumbai. We also have recently expanded in the Middle East & South East Asia. The company has also partnered with leading merchants for reward catalogue.

We are developing capabilities in emerging technologies i.e. predictive analytics and Machine learning for better insights and action planning to help our clients engage at a deeper level with their Employees and Channel Partners.