“Metaverse & NFTs will Change how Employees Experience Rewards and Recognition” Says Sourabh Deorah

Employee engagement doesn't come with a cookie-cutter approach often putting HR managers in difficult situations. Being the most critical factor in ensuring optimum productivity all while keeping their morale high, it becomes more than necessary to look beyond traditional approaches in staff management. Now that software tools are available to ease them out of this difficult job, it becomes all-important that they adapt to a comprehensive employee management platform providing end-to-end services. Advantage Club is a global employee engagement SaaS platform that makes employee engagement and recognition an effortless job. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sourabh Deorah, Co-Founder & CEO at Advantage Club.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers. 

Advantage Club is a global employee engagement platform driving workplace experience and well-being with features like rewards, recognition, perks, flexible employee benefits, and community building on a unified platform.

• We are an end-to-end digital Reward & Recognition platform that allows managers and organizations to acknowledge employees for their efforts, all with the click of a button. Through the platform, employees can give high-fives, likes, comments, and more to show their appreciation for their colleagues. Our R&R platform is also matched with a global reward redemption marketplace that lets employees choose from over 10,000+ global brands.
• Our Perks & Privileges solution allows organizations to add something special to employees' earnings by offering unique and exclusive corporate offers and deals across the country. Through our Flexible Benefits offering, companies can create multiple types of employee wallets curated to specific marketplaces, eg, wellness, work from home, L&D wallets, and more.
• Our Community and Fun Zone solution brings multiple employee engagement programs under one platform. With programs like intra-corporate games with live leaderboards, peer-to-peer marketplaces, and hobby clubs, our solution offers something unique for bringing employees of every type of organization together.
• Our Financial Wellness solution helps employees become financially savvy by offering facilities to save, and get loans and salary advances at affordable prices and zero interest rates.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company.

We envision a world where employees are highly engaged and happy, and every workplace, big or small, has a positive culture of appreciation and recognition. We help organizations build and run employee experience and engagement programs that resonate with their culture and values. 

We started with an end-to-end reward, recognition, and perks solution to facilitate meaningful employee engagement through exclusive privileges and rewards from our brand partners. The platform allows organizations to grant rewards and recognition to employees for hard work, and major milestones, and manage budgets, nominations, approvals, and social feeds. Over the next few months, we expanded our platform to include other employee engagement offerings such as communities, online game zones, hobby clubs, and classifieds. 

We also believe employee benefits should be beyond provident funds, time-offs, and free lunch or game rooms. Benefits must be more meaningful, valuable, and holistic to employees' unique needs. With this view in mind, we launched several holistic employee wellbeing offerings, such as the Flexible Benefits solution that allows employees to choose what they want category-wise. We have also launched financial wellness solutions such as Early Wage Access and the Advantage Card for Tax Saving, which help employees with their financial needs.

We are today one of the most comprehensive platforms offering solutions for all employee engagement & welfare initiatives.

3. What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

As a tech-driven organization, we have bold plans to revolutionize the employee experience and engagement space. We are planning a big move on the metaverse & NFTs that will change how employees experience rewards and recognition initiatives. We are building solutions that allow for an efficient solution to bring the best of both physical and virtual approaches together. We have found a product market fit and some early success. We will continue to expand our offering with the ultimate goal of catering to the entire employee lifecycle management.

4. What is the edge your company has over other players in the industry?

Our biggest differentiator is that we have an all-encompassing solution in the reward, recognition, perks, and benefits space. Our clients can launch several programs across the employee lifecycle on a single platform, giving them the flexibility to run programs with the least implementation effort. We have a highly modular offering relevant to organisations of varied employee sizes and highly customizable to needs. The other clear edge is that our app and platform experience is the best in the industry, which helps drive employee engagement for our clients. On an average, our clients have seen a 45% drop in attrition among employee cohorts where our solutions have been launched as against the other non-user cohorts.

5. What's your growth plan for the next 12 months?

On the business side, we are looking to expand aggressively in international markets, specifically in North America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We will also double down our effort in penetrating deeper into our current market and client base and winning the mandate for all employee lifecycle management needs.

6. What is the reason that organizations are using IoT/analytics/big data/AI/ML/Big Data Analytics?

As a tech-driven platform, we are constantly on the go to help organisations customise the platform and find opportunities to make the offering more relevant. We are using analytics to find early indicators of employee disengagement and help organisations tweak their R&R program or spruce their employee benefits program to cater to unique needs. We are extensively using ML to map user behavior patterns on the platform to offer a unique experience basis their past interactions. From a reporting perspective, we give access to dashboards and numerous analytics to HR managers to help them understand the level of employee engagement and where there might be potential for attrition. 

7. Where do you see growth coming in for the sector?

In a world where your location has become irrelevant, the talent market will get fiercer. And this will create intense competition to engage employees in different ways, and consequently, the idea of the benefits will become more prominent. The future is about creating a great employee experience. All the tenets that have been applied around customer experience over the last decade will come into force for employee experience in the next three to four years.

8. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

Our biggest achievement by far is the steady increase in employee retention rate amongst all our clients that have launched our programs. Many associations and industry bodies have recognised us including NHRD, World HRD Congress, ET HR, and BW BusinessWorld. Still, the most significant award for me has been the fact that we have never lost a client to date, which speaks volumes about the value we add to our customers.