The startup provides companies with a digital health platform that integrates key aspects of healthcare – connecting patients, healthcare professionals, corporates, pharmacies, health data and insurers. Current clients include AIA, AXA and Aetna and other partners including the Health Promotion Board (HPB), Guardian Pharmacy, as well as individual general practitioner clinics and laboratories.

“We see increasing corporate and insurer demand for enterprise digital health solutions like MyDoc. This funding is a strong boost for us to meet this demand by expanding our services throughout Asia and enter new markets. Our Series A funding round reflects the confidence our investors have in MyDoc’s business model and services, as well as the potential of the industry,” said Snehal Patel, CEO and Co-Founder, MyDoc.

Redefining Corporate Healthcare Management

This Series A round will fund the development of MyDoc@Work, a digital healthcare platform which provides corporate employees a wide range of health services – video consultation with doctors, online prescriptions, online medical certificates (MyMC), on-site health screenings and a private care network. The private care network provides access to dental, physiotherapy, eye health, and fitness and other services.

Through this platform, corporations can benefit from significant cost and operational efficiencies, through reduced administrative processes to manage medical certificates, insurance claims, decreased employee absenteeism (due to ill health) and minimized upfront employee healthcare costs.

“With MyDoc@Work, we’re building a simple, validated, but powerful corporate health tool that not only promotes, but creates action towards building a healthier company. MyDoc@Work allows corporate employees to enjoy the convenience of consulting a doctor remotely – saving time on traveling to the clinic as well as queuing to see the doctor and collecting medication – and overall better health as they are more likely to follow up with necessary treatments,” added Patel.

Focus on Insurtech Solutions

A second investment priority is the continued development of health-focused insurtech solutions based on MyDoc’s proprietary technology. The startup is now shifting its focus towards improving and expanding services to benefit both policyholders and payers.

Part of the Series A funds will be used to continue development of insurance-focused solutions that enable further automation of the health insurance process. This work will include tools that allow comprehensive data analysis to enhance the delivery of personalized care.

The partnership with UST Global would allow MyDoc to tap into the company’s technological capabilities and expertise, as well as grow the business through UST Global’s distribution channels and government partnerships.

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It is impossible to comprehend just how much data is produced each day – and just how little of it is really being put to use. This creates a vast blue ocean of opportunities for enterprises, including small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), to tap into and elevate their current hold in their respective marketplaces.

Many SMEs currently lack staff with the right skillsets to fully leverage on big data and analytics. It is also common for small business owners and management within SMEs to think that big data means ‘big cost’ or ‘big business’. Many are hesitant to explore big data initiatives because they believe that it requires major investment in hardware and software. In general, many traditional SMEs have been known to be reluctant towards embracing change.

Big data brings big opportunities

Every company began as a start-up. The success of Amazon is a clear showcase of the power of big data and how data can be tapped on to transform a small start-up into a massive industry disrupter and market leader.

Traditional bookstores used to track inventories – i.e., the books that are being stocked, those that are moving off the shelves and which are best sellers. This changed when retail moved online. Online bookstores can now see exactly what each customer is buying, how often they are buying, and even how they prefer to pay.

Soon after, by leveraging data, Amazon not only could track what customers bought, but also what they showed interest in, how they navigated the webpage, as well as how individuals reacted to promotions and similarities across different segments. Later on, Amazon developed algorithms to predict which books an individual customer was most likely to buy next. With this, Amazon transformed the traditional brick-and-mortar retailer into a data-driven e-commerce giant.

Digital footprints of customers have, for some time now, been revealing purchase patterns, preferences and interests, allowing businesses to implement more insight-driven tactics when engaging them. Suddenly, we are in an era where customer profiles are much clearer and more detailed. This is a new era of customer understanding. Just like the data, the opportunities are exploding too.

Starting small with big data

Even though the opportunity is huge, SMEs can start by taking baby steps towards leveraging big data. They can focus their efforts and dive deep into a few business critical sets of data. For example, sales in a specific sector, or performance metrics during peak versus low seasons. This will definitely yield quicker and better results than trying to take on too much, too soon.

SMEs may also consider creating a small interdisciplinary team to experiment with extracting business value from data instead of limiting it to skilled but isolated individuals such as those in the IT department.

In fact, to make things easier and more accessible, these days SMEs have much better access to the latest technology as competition continues to drive prices down and hardware becomes more of a commodity. Furthermore, software, services and even infrastructure can now be delivered over the cloud, making them even more attainable and scalable.

Additionally, cloud delivered infrastructure can help SMEs take advantage of more sophisticated IT operations, which previously might not have been accessible to them due to high costs of operations and up-front investments. SMEs can now start small and face less of a constraint when adopting new technologies.

Think big (data) now

Interestingly, several forward looking SMEs are already seeing big data as something more than just a buzz phrase. They are already harnessing the power of analytics to gain insights into business trends, make market projections, understand customer behavior and more. Big data and analytics is allowing these SMEs to be run more efficiently and become more competitive.

As exemplified earlier by the Amazon story, many successful smaller companies have already shown how data and insightful analytics have created unimaginable business opportunities.

Moving forward, big data will become an integral part of almost every industry. Applications that are essential to managing data are only going to become more accessible, affordable and user-friendly. It is certainly going to be easier for smaller firms to tap on big data and achieve bigger results. Nevertheless, those that start to embrace big data and analytics now will benefit most in the future.

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In the absence of a structured and automated feedback system, both the subordinates and supervisors fall prey to the perception trap. In most cases, perceptions are and can be deceptive and may lead to incorrect appraisals and quickly foster employee disengagement.

HR practitioners are coming round to a common view that an annual performance review comes way too late for an organization to take measures to address a problem with an employee, because by then the major part of the damage would have already been done.

According to Gallup, almost 33% of employees in leading organizations are actively disengaged. This results in not only productivity losses but it also adversely impacts organization culture. It is not that all of these disengaged bunch are the bad fish, many of them are actually old stars or potential high performers, caught in the ambush of ‘so-called’ victimization by superiors and peers. In the light of the aforementioned facts it is imperative that a regular feedback system should be put in place to turn the workforce into a more engaged unit.

The feedback system should be robust, ongoing, scalable and intelligent enough to throw actionable results. In the absence of such a system, employee expectation is set on anecdotal recollections of performance. This often results in grandiose self-appraisals or fosters unrealistic expectations from the management. On the other hand, supervisor evaluations are either hard KRA output driven or purely perception based. To weed out subjectivity from the appraisal process many innovations like maintenance of “Critical Incident Diary” or quarterly feedback sessions have been tried out in the past but they met with limited success. Annual appraisals are still the rule and not an exception. HR axperts aver that capturing structured feedback becomes a chore and gets discontinued after the initial enthusiasm dies out. So, we have employees rogering their organizations, in employee engagement surveys like Q12 run by Gallup. Perhaps, in many of these companies Q12 survey is the only time the HR function connects with the entire workforce.

Sensing this gap many Fortune 500 companies like GE have started their own in-house instant feedback platforms — PD@GE (Performance Development at General Electric). Sniffing a big opportunity many startups in the West have floated apps that squarely address this void. To check out a few of the successful ones you may have a look at 15Five, 6Q, Hyphen and Vibecatch.

In the Indian app space, the pioneer in this domain is Samvad, a startup based out of Bangalore. It is run by two passionate ex-IBM executives Manmeet Singh and Vipin Ravindranath. “Samvad” is a Sanskrit word that means ‘conversation’. The Raison d’être of this app, according to the founders, is to enable a meaningful and continued engagement in an organization, utilizing technology as an enabler.

They had done extensive ground work for the past 18 months and the app’s beta version was piloted in January this year, in select large organizations. Post rave reviews & feedback from CEOs and the HR fraternity a full commercial version was launched earlier this month.

Samvad is hosted on the cloud and is available on both Android and iOS mobile operating systems. In the current avatar, it is recommended for mid to large sized organizations that have 100+ employees. Shortly, a lighter version would be available for SMEs and SOHOs. For enterprises there is an option of SSO (single-sign-on) to enable smooth adoption. It is worth noting that app customization and downstream integration to existing Employee assessment tools can be enabled as, by and large, Samvad’s technology follows an open architecture.

The deployment is almost plug-and-play which means that the app is ready to use within 24 hours TAT, for any organization wanting to do so.

The benefits that can accrue to an organization are listed below:

• Helps an organization adopt the culture of open and continuous feedback
• Enables all of workforce to get on a platform where a continuous conversation can happen on the performance of an individual
• Give feedback to anyone in the organization and retrieve the same for annual appraisal discussions
• Give anonymous feedback to anyone in the organization (Employees don’t have to run to Glassdoor.com, for airing their frustration!)
• Seek feedback from anyone and everyone in the organization
• Rate the feedback that is received
• Appreciate a colleague and let their department or functional colleagues know the good work
• Dashboards for HR to know the Feedback statistics
• Analytical reports & MIS

The app can be downloaded from Google’s Play Store or Apple’s AppStore, but the services can be availed only when user licenses are bought. It doubles up as a multi-purpose employee communications and Feedback system that ties-in with the organization’s legacy HR platforms. So, instead of subscribing to multiple service providers for niche apps like TapMyBack for employee recognition or GetHppy for employee engagement, HR managers can have a single window solution via Samvad.

Every Indian employee can relate to the famous Hari Sadu ad by popular job portal Naukri.com as most of us would have had the experience of working under a bullying boss who is always upset. These kinds of bosses contribute to employee disengagement and attrition. To compound matters in today’s world, there are forums available that can blow the organizations reputation to smithereens, if the bad managers get listed on the portals like eBossWatch or RateYourManager etc. Even Naukri.com is piloting a similar service to list the ‘Hari Sadus’ to forewarn the prospective employees.

If you do not want your organization to be caught napping while company management feedback gushes out into the open fora, it is advisable that Employee Engagement is taken seriously and an enabling platform like Samvad gets integrated in your scheme of things.

The post Employee engagement gets appified; Come on Letssamvad! appeared first on TECHSEEN.

What makes India exciting for marketers is that the country’s mobile market is continuing to grow at an exponential pace. As per a Morgan Stanley research report, India is expected to overtake the United States and become the second-largest smartphone market by 2017. This trend is also driving increased internet penetration, which is expected to reach 50 per cent by 2018.

Marketers should be happy with the prospect of a booming Indian mobile marketplace, right?

Not so fast. India’s low mobile monetization rates could be at risk by another looming trend, ad blocking.

Is Ad Blocking destined to dominate India’s mobile internet?

So far in 2016, the installation of mobile ad blocking apps has spiked in India. It is part of a global trend that has seen nearly 200 million people installing and using ad blocking software, which is still a very small percentage of the total. Globally, the growth rate of new users downloading and installing mobile ad blockers has more than tripled in 2016, but there are signs that this is slowing.

About 20 percent of monthly active users in the United States have installed ad blocking software, compared to just two percent of users in India. Any increase at all in the adoption of mobile ad blocking in India could reduce the profitability of mobile campaigns because Indian customers already present mobile marketers with tight margins. However, it’s important to understand why Indian mobile users are installing ad blocking in order to address this growing issue.

Indians use Ad Blocking to browse faster

Accessing the internet in India is slow and expensive. Most people access the internet outside of India’s big cities, in places where painfully slow 2G service is the norm. Ads in particular increase the loading time of a mobile webpage.

In a New York Times study, one tested mobile page weighed in at 19.4 megabytes without an ad blocker and four megabytes with one. For people on a data budget, and particularly for users in countries where mobile data is expensive, this can be a big incentive to block ads. On top of that, Indians pay high fees for capped data plans. Every time an ad is loaded instead of the expected content is an opportunity cost.

Finally, ad networks are sometimes used as vectors for crippling malware and viruses, a disaster when mobile is the “everything device” used not just for shopping, but for communication, banking, health, and more.

Ad Blocking becomes part of the Search for ways to access content

While Indians have plenty of reasons to block mobile ads, they also have to deal with India’s government, which is also blocking content.

Citing reasons of protecting national security and public morals, India’s government frequently blocks domains and apps from the internet in the country. The most commonly blocked sites include content from adult websites and those inciting religious intolerance.

However, like anywhere else in the world, people even in this market will always continue to search for ways to access blocked content and banned sites. To circumvent government restrictions, Indians are turning to VPNs, which are increasingly being integrated into web browsers such as Opera. Along with a native VPN, Opera now comes equipped with native ad blocking.

Four tactics for dealing with mobile Ad Blocking in India

Since ad blocking will only become more prevalent in the future, here are four tips to help mobile marketers succeed:

1. Diversify your efforts

Knowing who the end consumer is always the most important aspect of your marketing strategy. It should be focused on delivering the right message, to the right person at the right time. In order to do this you need to test different messages across mediums like email, social media, or even content marketing platforms. Your strategy should be to engage with your audience in the medium that suits their browsing habits.

2. Focus on quality and user experience

Focus on the end user’s experience when you design your ad campaigns. Ensuring that the mobile experience is compelling is the most important part of any campaign. Consumers behave differently on mobile, and you need to comply. When it comes to quality, you must make sure your ads are designed with the mobile screen in mind and the experience is not simply reused from desktop. Putting in the extra effort will make all the difference.

3. Experiment with native advertising

Native advertising is whitelisted by content blocking apps and plugins and has a great upside. Native advertising is more difficult for ad blockers to to filter out and the experience makes it more familiar to the experience consumers are familiar with when in apps.

4. Build your own app

While this may seem like an audacious goal, building your own app that solves a specific problem may be the most surefire way to connect with your audience and avoid being blocked. You can then use tactics such as in-app marketing, re-engagement, and other practices like push notifications to communicate effectively with your audience. That way, you have ultimate control over how you market to consumers.

Ad blocking is here to stay, and its use in India is only going to rise, how much no one knows. What we do know is that ad blocking can create major challenges for publishers and advertisers alike.

Finding creative solutions that will ensure the end users experience is the paramount priority will help publishers work around this challenge and remain profitable.

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The entities that deploy the former cite costs and scale issues as the inhibiting factors forcing them avoid embracing technology. The operators in the latter spectrum have the scope and scale to deploy the extant technological tools to run their operations.

There are also in-between guys who use lighter versions of hosted call center solutions like Intelliverse (a sales CRM), Con Vox and the like. But these are essentially upgraders in transit who one day would graduate to fully hosted Cloud solution or build an in-house automated set-up.

The customer reach out mechanism for all the three species is more or less similar where most of the calls end up being intrusive and pesky, so to speak. Another commonality is the agent burn out and attendant employee attrition. Cutting across industries like BSFI, Telecom or any other service sales process; the attrition percentages are as high as 20% month-on-month basis for telesales. This translates into having a completely new workforce, every five months. Such levels of attrition, leads to wastage of time & energy for constant recruitment and training. This piece does not aim at addressing the attrition challenge but delves into the telesales ecosystem to sight ‘what” and ‘why’ new technologies are emerging for this industry.

A study on telesales attrition done by a leading telecom operator, across top 10 Indian cities, has thrown up some interesting findings:

1. Roughly 80% of its telesales workforce comprised of women telecallers.
2. The agent attrition percentage (>=23%) too had close to 80% composition of women.
3. About 50% of the women left for better pastures or were unable to bear the high work pressure. These were classified as “Voluntary reasons”.
4. The balance 50% left work due to personal issues- like time to commute, safety at workplace, continuing education, aging parents at home or young children to be tended etc. These were clustered as “Involuntary reasons”.
5. On probing the ‘Involuntary list’ of respondents it came to light that given a chance or option these women would like to work from home. An opportunity was unearthed that trained and experienced women workforce was cooling their heels at home for want of home based employment that suited their skills- namely sales.

The last nugget of wisdom triggered a technological innovation. An app that was hitherto parallel to a virtual call center solution was adapted to create a platform for home based calling.

The product is called Tentacle by Sunoray Systems. Tentacle is a ‘cloud software’ that is available as a mobile app. It enables telesales operators to handle their sales, tele-calling, lead management and MIS Reports. This solution is being pitched to women who want to work from home.

It is a nifty solution that helps upload databases to callers remotely through an admin console. The solution has a DND filter that weed out database which are registered on the National “Do Not Call” Registry. The telecallers have to download the app from Google Play store. The app consumes sub 500 MB of space and is compatible with all smartphones on Android versions starting 4.2.2 onwards. The telesales operator has complete control on the app usage where s/he can set the timings allowed for telecalling and can check how many remote agents are live and outcalling. After logging into the app the telecaller can select the allocated campaign she wants to undertake first and start her day.

Like a virtual dialer the customer records pop up and on pressing on a record the outcall is initiated. After the call is over a call disposition window opens up wherein the status of the call may be keyed in.

Pre-defined dispositions like “Not Interested”, “Call Back”, “Confirmed Lead” etc can be selected as per the customer interaction. The dispositions are automatically updated on the remotely located server. All customer conversations get recorded on the cloud which are then downloaded by Team Leaders and verified for Quality Checks. Post verification the lead gets further forwarded to field teams. The lead status updation can be done by the field team when it physically meets the customer at the designated location. The reverse flow of information is also in real time. Customer application forms and document pick-up status are known to all the constituents in the value chain via the app itself.

Most of the leading mobile telephony companies and insurance firms are latching on to this ‘work from home’ bandwagon, thanks to this app’s availability.

There are many other developments in the Telesales & Service space where technology is re-shaping the way business gets done. Innovations like ‘virtual receptionist’ accord prestige to a small enterprise that wants to masquerade as a large corporation.

Direct Lite solution by Sunoray again, is a tool where one can build a telephone survey in a jiffy. Here, all that the client needs to do is select a dial-in number and write the desired questions in a web interface. After listening to how they sound the client can publish his survey. Tracking responses of customers who call-in, is available in real time.

Voice Biometrics in IVR solutions are also getting re-defined in telesales Inbound processes. This one would catch on like a wildfire in the times to come.

These are a few of the new technological fads that are inundating telesales entities. More updates to follow. Watch out for this space!

The post Mobile apps are bringing in a paradigm shift in telesales appeared first on TECHSEEN.

However, overlooking the need for an integrated solution for streamlining a business initially, poses a hurdle in the long run, especially when the business spurs up on its growth track. Software working in silos duplicate data at many locations, leading to redundancy. A sole instance of error in data recording will have a ripple effect of wrong information percolating down from there on. For instance, consider a manufacturing unit with a warehouse. If there are individual spots for stock tracking at the factory and the warehouse, there would be multiple tracking and recording of the same stock, leading to discrepancies. As the business grows, so does the need for keeping a track of the activities along with interdepartmental interactions.

This is where integrated systems come in. With an integrated system in place, data from various departments can be stored at a central location, which can be updated in real time and edited or deleted as and when required. This would most importantly negate duplication while keeping the data sorted and clean.

However, the lack of realization and enthusiasm for integrated software solutions of the SMEs for their businesses is quite prominent. Though an integrated software solution can help a business save on so many expenses like on processes, resources, time management, etc., yet there seem to be bottlenecks, which cause a lackluster attitude of the SMEs towards adapting an integrated software solution.

Simplifying the Complex

One of the evident factors that affects the decision-making in favor of integrated software is the perceived complexity of the systems. Integrated systems are easier to handle as compared to some of the individual software. This is due to the self-explanatory buttons and the easy-to-navigate systems of integrated solutions.

Compatibility

Another bottleneck is the compatibility of systems. For instance, for a retailer of garments, two of the most important needs of the business are inventory and accounts. If the business is already working with an accounting system and wants to migrate to another system that manages inventory, can the team do it? This is a genuine dilemma and the answer is most likely to be a ‘No’. The solution here lies in understanding the need for an automation specific to one’s business in the very initial stage.

The next step would be to look for a software solution which can work to serve the purpose of automation. The last leg of decision would include looking at automation in silos or as an integrated system, which would mean that one either wants a specific application for each process or that your applications are in sync with each other. In the last case, for instance, Deskera has modules for management of financial services, human resource, and customer relationship management software along with inventory management. All of these modules are compatible with each other and can work simultaneously while sharing the database. Restricting data sharing is optional.

Pricing

Pricing of an integrated system is also a perceived bottleneck that is often contemplated on. Here is something to rethink on. Infrastructure and human resource will usually take away a good chunk of the expenses. However, with an integrated automated system in place, businesses could do away with a part of infrastructure expense along with a lot of human resource expense. An integrated software solution from Deskera can be conveniently hosted on cloud, which would bring the cost of a physical server and its maintenance to nil. Physical servers eat into precious real estate, add to power bills, incur maintenance costs and would need constant technology upgradation. When systems get automated, need for human resource gets minimized.

Turnaround Time

On hindsight, it is also a fact that automation gives businesses an edge and earns profits in various ways. With features to aid real-time database updates and auto report generation, one saves on time; TAT (turnaround time) for customers is almost instant, and forecasting of business strategies based on database becomes easier.

Integrated enterprise software is a need of the present times, especially with growing customer expectations, competitive businesses, and instant service and grievance management being the need of the customer. Adopting an integrated software solution will not only keep data sorted and updated on real-time basis but would also provide impetus needed to propel the business towards a global high.

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