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Page 1: Jivity featured on Smart Techie

EMPOWERING TECHNOLOGY LEADERS OF TOMORROW thesmarttechie.comAugust 2011

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Guru Talk: Nilesh Gupta, iPrimitus Consultancy Services VC Talk: Nandini Hirianniah, Morpheus Venture Partners Most Promising Cool Products

MostPromising10

Mukund Mohan, CEOCreating

Wthe OWExperience

Page 2: Jivity featured on Smart Techie

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Human psyche is very strangeand unpredictable. A simplegesture like a small gift ontheir birthday from the com-pany can go a long way and

make an employee feel very happyand valued. Similarly an unexpectedsouvenir for New Year can at timesmake people feel overwhelmed withjoy and make them feel appreciated bytheir company. Small acts like thesecan make the employees feel that theyare an integral part of the companyand that their company cares aboutthem. Can this be taken forward to in-crease brand loyalty? Will this help inreducing the attrition rate? The answeris yes! But how can a company withhundreds or even thousands of em-ployees and very large number of cus-tomers keep a track of all this? Well,they can let Jivity handle it for them.Bangalore based Jivity specializes

in providing brand engagement solu-tions for companies and educationalinstitutions. Companies are desper-ately trying to retain their customersby employing devices like advertising,social media, public relations andmore, but falling short of this goalmany a times. Higher salary packagesand other benefits are often offered,but employee attrition still remains asa major challenge. When all thesemeans are failing, what is it that acompany can do to increase theirbrand loyalty still remains as the big-ger question! Jivity is trying to answerby employing its merchandising capa-bilities to actively engage the employ-ees, customers and partners of theircustomers. “We let the companies un-derstand what part of their brand peo-ple like and appropriately run theirbrand merchandize, thus helping themto improve brand loyalty,” saysMukund Mohan, CEO, Jivity.

Creatingthe

Experience

coverstory

Mukund Mohan, CEO

By Hari Anil

Page 3: Jivity featured on Smart Techie

Modus OperandiThe company starts by identifying thebrand placement of its clients. Under-standing is the key; understandingwhere a company is standing in termsof brand value, loyalty and engage-ment, and then figuring out what canbe done to improve it. Jivity puts a lotof efforts into this, and this helps themin successfully taking the next step.Based on the result of the first stage,the company devices the plan andstrategy to take the branding further. Itthen goes towards merchandize selec-tion and innovation. With its in-housedesigners Jivity custom designs mer-chandize for its customers. As a resultof this approach the products thatcome to the table are very specificallypersonalized products which fit thecustomer’s image. For example, one ofits customers is a trucking companyand Jivity built a miniature of theclient’s truck with their emblem andall the other details. “One of our cus-tomers, wanted to put together a greencampaign and so we put together awhole bunch of eco friendly productsthat they could give to their employ-ees and customers along with the otherproducts that they have,” says Mohan.

Jivity works out a monthly en-gagement campaign for each of theircustomers. In the month of any partic-ular festival the prices of anything andeverything associated to that festivalgo sky high. This is another target areafor the company, they will bring prod-ucts that are relevant to that particularfestival to their stores and let its cus-

tomers provide this to their employeesat reasonable prices. At this point, thecompany is preparing for the Inde-pendence Day campaign, in the monthof September they will be putting to-gether a Rakhi related campaign, afterthat Ganesh Chadurthi, and this goeson. Thus helping the employees getgood quality festival products at veryaffordable rates at the apt time.

Jivity Rewards is a hosted softwaresolution that the company provides toits customers to help them administerand manage the program. The cus-tomers and employees can directly,from the client’s website, access theonline brand store to look at merchan-dize offered, get status on their re-wards, and to pursue redemptionoptions. Since the portal is seamlesslyintegrated into the client’s intranet site,it is only visible to their employees.But there are many who are not happybuying online, who wants the touchand feel of what they are buying, forsuch people the company has on-premise retail brand stores, Store-on-Wheels, a temporary retail brand storelike a mobile-store, and brand vendingmachines.

From Jivity the brand profession-als can obtain results and analytics ontop selling products, categories that areselling frequently and new product of-ferings, analyze the response of theemployees and customers of its clientsand give feedback to the client. “Wegather a lot of information like, whatthe employees like, what they don’tlike, when their birthdays are, when a

particular campaigns work, and so on.We put all these together and handlethis over to our clients. This also helpsus with customizing the products,”says Mohan. Using this methodologythe company smoothly and cost effec-tively manages to get the brandingdone for its clients.

The 75 people strong team is de-ployed in sales, marketing, customerservices, fulfillment, delivery and en-gineering to give its customers verybalanced and complete services.

The ClientsMultinational organizations spend mil-lions every year in the process of hir-ing, not to mention all the time andother resources they put into this. Thenthey spend several more millions ontraining these hired employees. Eventhough not so much, the small compa-nies are also spending a good percentof their revenue in this. After that theyare fighting and struggling through at-trition. All the measures they are tak-ing to challenge the attrition, does notseem to have much of an effect. It is inthis scenario that Jivity came withtheir much simpler, effective, and costefficient brand merchandizing modelto engage the employees.

The Indian brand merchandizingmarket is a Rs. 500 crore marketwhich is growing at a very rapid pace.The opportunity present in this marketis huge. To leverage this opportunitythe company is presently operating infour different sectors, Pharma, Finan-cial Services, Technology and Educa-

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tion, and boasts over 50 happy cus-tomers. These customers include thegiants like Dell, Mahindra Satyam, In-dian School of Business, TATA Tele-services, Franklin Templeton,Mindtree, Oakridge InternationalSchool and more. These are all sectorswith so many differences, companiesare poles apart, but one thing they allhave in common is the people. Thepeople are all the same, the same ges-tures make them happy and appreci-ated, and this is why Jivity’s modelworks irrespective of the sector.

What is so special with Jivity thatis attracting all these big shots to it?How is it different from its competi-tion? “To help our clients have maxi-mum control in brand merchandising,we give them the option of onlinebrand store, retail brand store, a brandstore on wheels, and brand vendingmachines. No one else has such widevariety of options,” says Mohan. Thisis also a differentiation factor for thecompany. Keeping the customers andemployees of their customers happyand satisfied is the whole motto of Jiv-ity. “Jivity have provided us from timeto time, various innovative gift itemsat competitive prices, shorter leadtimes and pro-actively provided gift-ing solutions to suit our budget and in-dustry,” says one of its customers,Infotech.

The company constantly comes upwith new and new products, both stan-dard and customized products to keeptheir clients engaged. On top of thisthey analyze the data that they gener-ate and improvise them accordingly.This keeps them on the edge at anypoint of time and this is another rea-son why the big companies stick tothem.

The WOW experience“The whole point is to reinforce thebrand perception among the employ-ees and the customers. We do that byspecifically custom creating productsfor them, and we have a very wide

range of products to choose from aswell,” says Mohan. The companyflaunts with more than 100 top notchbrands and about 20,000 unique prod-ucts in 200 different categories. It part-ners with a lot of these companies tomake itself capable of getting the cus-tomized products on a regular basis.This wide variety itself makes Jivitystand out in the crowd and that is alsoa reason why it was able to attract somany customers in such a short period.

As if customized products fromLevi’s, Reebok, Fastrack, HCL,Nokia, IFB, Titan,Apple, and the likesare not enough, Jivity makes it a habitto hatch new and new ingenious waysto create and retain that WOW experi-ence among the employees and cus-tomers of its clients. Among these arediscounts. For example, an employeeof Dell walks into Café Coffee Day orLifestyle and gets a discount of somepercentage since they are an employeeof that company. This is sure to makethem feelWOW.With such campaignsand promotions they make sure thattheir end customers stay happy.

The company understands theneed of the day and manages to bringproducts accordingly. For example,now the necessity of healthy foodhabits is becoming popular among thepeople and they are changing theirfood habits accordingly, and now thecompany has started offering organicfood materials like daal, rice and moreto meet this demand. They also offertheir end customers biking tours,trekking, or similar packages to keepthem even more engaged.

A peek into the future“We intend to increase our number ofcustomers by several fold and we wantto be known as a company that createsthe WOW experience among the em-ployees of our clients and create a lotof shareholder value,” says a highlyenthusiastic Mohan about what hewants to do in the future. The com-pany is suiting itself up to become a

major player in this fast growing mar-ket. As long as the company’s focalpoint remains their customers and theykeep on improvising and innovating,the future looks very bright for it, thefuture can have nothing in store for itthan a hockey stick growth.

The Man Behind the SceneMukundMohan, the founder and CEOof the company, has a reputation ofbuilding successful companies. He hasso far successfully found and sold fourentrepreneurial ventures including thesocial media marketing company,

BuzzGain. His has made it a routine tofollow the technology, entrepreneurialand business circles closely and is aregular blogger on these.

Before venturing into the entrepre-neurial scenery he has successfullysteered leadership teams at HP, Invois,Ariba Technologies and Cisco Sys-tems. He was also on the board ofiConclude (acquired by HP), Seman-tic Defense and Kinetic Brains. Mohanis known for his innovative ideas, abil-ity to build, manage and leads teamsto success, and this quality is reflectedthroughout his career.

His experience in the sales andmarketing sector made him see the op-portunity in the space in India. Hethought about how a more effectivemedium than advertising can be made,how companies can be made intostrong magnets that keep on attractingtheir employees and customers, thisthought finally led to the conceptual-ization of Jivity.

The Indian brand merchandizing isa Rs. 500 crore market, growing ata very rapid pace. Jivity is leveragingthis opportunity by operating acrossPharma, Financial Services,Technology and Education sectors

Jivity Team

Customers and employees candirectly access the online brand storeto look at merchandize offered, getstatus on their rewards, and to pursueredemption options.