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Channel Partner

How to Engage with Your Channel Partners in Disruptive Times

channel partner engagement

The new normal has called for flexibility and inventiveness in the way we do business. However, for organizations that rely on indirect sales for revenue, channel sales alignment has taken a big hit. Organizations are either scaling back channel partner budgets or scrambling to ensure continued channel sales in a tight market. In addition, the casualties, isolation and suffering caused by the pandemic has affected human morale everywhere, and your channel partners are no exception. For long-term business success, it’s imperative that organizations step up to nurture their channel networks at this time. In this blog, we’ll talk about the role of technology in redefining channel partner engagement for the new normal, in the following ways:

Open the lines of Communication

The first measure organizations must undertake is setting up active lines of communication, including chat, helpdesk and a ticketing system through a channel engagement software. Increasing availability for channel partners across the board including technical leads and senior executives can help provide the much needed alignment and support to ramp up sales efforts in a tight market.

Double down on Sales Enablement

Brand strategies are likely to change for organizations seeking new sales opportunities during the pandemic. Sales and marketing teams will need to ensure they’re able to share evolving strategies, target personas and market research with their sales channels real-time. Leveraging robust sales analytics tools in a channel partner management software can help make crucial data available to the firm and partners alike. Role-based content display can ensure that only relevant reports are visible to the concerned stakeholders.

Make virtual events count

Trade shows, expositions and sales conventions have come to an abrupt stop, preventing channel partners to make new in-person connections. Organizations must step up to not just conduct virtual events among its various channel partners but also use them to facilitate engagement. For example, continuing traditional partner awards ceremonies online and sending physical trophies, badges and mementos to partners’ homes through a channel incentives software. Such digital tools can automate partner reward fulfillment, saving time and costs.

Share Best Practices

Channel partners are uniquely positioned to gather customer data and understand the pulse of the target customer base at the grassroots level. Having an online collaboration forum or knowledge base can help in recording such data to refine the organization’s business approach, convert indirect sales leads and help focus on high-value customers.

Realign Incentives

Incentivizing channel partner performance does not necessarily mean increasing financial compensation. Non-financial incentives are known to have a greater impact on workforce performance and with digital reward and recognition tools, the reward options are endless. The key is to be intentional and understand what channel partners want through pulse surveys, then create a rewards structure around the feedback. A great example of non-financial awards can be online training courses to upskill during the pandemic or healthcare vouchers offering discounts on medicines or doctor’s consultation.

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Organizational Culture Popular

People Focused Leadership in Times of Crisis

people focused leadership

The pandemic has resulted in a major upheaval within the world of work. With a fresh rise of cases and mortalities, it is a tumultuous time for us all, whether through exposure on the field or juggling priorities while working from home. The new normal has forced business leaders to step up their managerial skills as they navigate untested waters and struggle to keep morale and productivity up. As the crisis exacerbates, leaders assume an even more important role in ensuring employee motivation and engagement. According to McKinsey, people-oriented leadership qualities are shown to better pull organizations through the pandemic. One important way of doing this is by appreciating and motivating employees on a regular basis. This blog talks about the various ways in which leaders can create a culture of employee appreciation during this difficult phase:

  • Owning workplace culture: Top-down approach

Culture is always driven top-down so it’s important for leaders to consciously create a culture which encourages employees to stay loyal and come back to physical workplaces when the time comes. Regular company updates, announcements and video messages from senior management published via a company-wide collaboration tool, for example, can be effective in making employees feel connected and included.

  • Reinventing recognition: Frequent, peer-based, CSR

Recognition efforts, especially manager-to-peer recognition, should be ramped up to acknowledge the work that employees do on an everyday basis. Honoring one’s duties is no mean feat when anxiety and uncertainty are widespread and employees need an acknowledgement of the same. A digital employee recognition tool can be helpful in structuring recognition parameters as per organizational culture and reminding leaders to thank their teams regularly.

  • Promoting wellness: Virtual events, physical and mental health initiatives

A healthy workforce means a more productive one, which is why employee wellness needs to be an area of focus for all leaders. A great way to achieve this is through promoting events like health seminars, yoga and mindfulness sessions etc. throughout the year. These can be conducted virtually using an employee engagement platform. Organizations can also track mental and emotional health using employee sentiment analytics using the same platform. Additionally, a firm can incentivize employees to meet targets on the organization’s wellness app. For example- winning rewards points upon completing 10,000 steps consistently.

  • Manager-peer relations: Performance management system

Team coordination and alignment suffers in a remote working environment, which is why technology becomes indispensable in maintaining an effective feedback system. Maintaining a digital log of achievements, areas of improvement as well as accessing KPI analytics and peer comparison gives managers the insights they need to improve individual employee performance. According to Gallup, managers in particular, have the most important role in determining employee performance during the pandemic. The right data can inform a manager’s strategy and help in leveraging employee strengths more effectively.

Having a well-rounded rewards and engagement strategy is of paramount importance if leaders want to build a strong employer brand despite the crisis. The need of the hour is for them to leverage the right digital tools to engage a distributed workforce while crafting a new approach to building a people-first culture.

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Rewards and Recognition

Why standard reports and analytics are not enough for RnR

customized reporting in RnR

The current world of evolving workplaces demands organizations to be adaptive and make constant changes in their processes, policies and even their business models. Fluctuations in the economy driven by an unpredictable health crisis, have compelled leaders to focus on engaging and retaining their best talent. In such a scenario, it is imperative for organizations to have the right data to guide their employee engagement program. Basic analytics tools are already provided by RnR software vendors across the globe, but the relevance of the reports available and current visualization standards are being increasingly questioned by HR teams. In this blog, we will discuss the shortcomings of standard reports and analytics on an employee engagement platform as well as suggestions for what could boost the ROI of the reporting mechanism on a daily basis.

The first step towards interpreting data is often knowing which questions to ask. Singular data metrics could glaze of the specific needs of any organization. For instance, having reports on the number of logins into the platform is not useful without knowing the personas of the employees who frequently login. In the same way, knowing the number of recognitions has no impact unless it is accompanied by further data on recognition patterns at the location, department and team level to allow for interventions. On the other hand, platforms that bombard users with too many reports, complex matrices and fancy visuals often fail to reveal the inside story of the engagement platform without a measurable action plan going forward. Below are some of the ways in which people engagement analytics can actually help move the needle on organizational impact:

  • Customized reporting- Role-based dashboards

Reports need to be tailored first and foremost to the role of the employee within the organization. This means having separate dashboards for employees of different departments and hierarchies. Customized reporting helps in throwing up the right information for every stakeholder without having them wade through irrelevant data.

  • Performance Reporting- Insights for Appraisals

With the ongoing appraisal season, HR teams are looking for 360-degree feedback systems to create an accurate picture of employee performance. RnR tools that offer performance insights through features like an employee scorecard and achievement logs can assist the appraisal process by providing easily accessible crucial details in a top-down appraisal.

  • Buildable Reports- Demand-driven complexity

Reports and analytics need to be aligned with organizational needs and mature as the demand arises. Having a DIY reporting tool helps to simplify or create more detailed reports at will. For example- getting a time-based comparative view like monthly or quarterly engagement statistics can be done with a few clicks, without having a dependency on an account manager.

  • Actionable Insights- Prescriptive Analytics

Most standard data analytics tools provide the numbers but fail to provide actionable insights or highlight what is important from the business perspective. As a result, managers and leaders who are already pressed for time fail to derive value from RnR reports. Having an in-house consulting team that provides you with quantifiable and tested methodologies for improving your metrics ensures a complete package.

  • Effective UI- User-friendliness

Lastly, analytics around RnR reports need to make the lives of the various stakeholders simpler. UI elements like a single window view of essential data, clean graphs and real-time updates encourages adoption of the often ignored analytics tool of the employee engagement platform.

Any modern business cannot undermine the value of data in developing resilience towards change. However, RnR reporting needs to be impact-driven and help in bridging real gaps in data. Ideally, RnR analytics should help in repairing weak links within work culture, measuring and managing RnR spends, improving the employee rewards program, and planning the employee engagement roadmap to remain adaptable to change.

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Rewards and Recognition

Hyper Personalization of EX through Rewards

Personalization of Total Rewards

Gone are the days when employee rewards and recognition programs comprised of a generic list of perks for all. Organizations today are fully aware of the importance of having a holistic, tailored employee benefits experience to engage their workforce. In today’s personalization-driven economy, technology has transformed consumer experiences, which are driven by targeted offerings and relevant customer interactions. Employees now have also come to expect the same level of personalization within their workplace. Given the generally declining attention span of millennial workers, an employee rewards program must be extremely relevant and tailored to unique preferences to ensure high adoption. Additionally, pandemic related disruptions in full swing, employees are looking to employers to help them with cope with new economic, social and health related issues.

Hyper Personalization of Total Rewards

The hyper-personalization of EX through rewards involves giving employees the ability to craft their own experiences within their organization. This can mean the following:

  • The freedom to choose rewards

Having the ability to choose your own benefits or rewards from a host of relevant, compelling options is essential for employees to engage with the rewards program. Many organizations offer digital rewards in the form of e-vouchers or a vast e-commerce catalog. These can fail to generate interest either because they offer dated options or because there are too many options to choose from, which causes indecision. According to the 2019 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey, 23 percent respondents reported that they did not know what rewards their workers value. Having a specially curated catalog that reflects your employee’s demographic preferences can help overcome this challenge.

  • Timely and relevant recognition

Recognition is an important prerequisite to make employees feel seen, acknowledged and motivated to give their best. Timely recognition can take place through an employee recognition software, which can create nudges and reminders for recognition. Thus, if a notification goes out to an employee’s team on their work anniversary, say, or to the higher management after they win a nomination, it can spark timely recognition and enhance connection. In fact, this latest study by Gallup shows that the most meaningful recognition comes from a manager or a high-level leader like the CEO.

  • Employee Feedback

Regular feedback in the form of pulse surveys is an important way to get employee opinion on important aspects of EX, such as work timing preferences, infrastructural challenges, team connect, benefits preferences and more. An employee engagement platform can help collate critical data relating to attrition and engagement, as well as translate it in a simple, actionable format for HR and other management leaders. Given that improved retention is a key goal of employee engagement, it’s important to remember this statistic from Gallup which states that highly engaged business units achieve 59% less turnover in low-turnover organizations, hence there is a strong need to measure and manage engagement.

  • Regular communication

Frequent interactions regarding the rewards framework can increase the chances of reward redemption. Reminders relating to reward points or notifications regarding recommended benefits based on earlier purchases can make employees feel positive about their employer brand and feel taken care of.

  • Intuitive Rewards Framework

Using technology to create an intuitive rewards framework, including a mobile app with consumer grade features like a mood-o-meter, AI based chatbot, achievement records, recognition data, social wall and the like in a gamified environment can prove instrumental in the successful adoption of any employee rewards program.

The modern, multi-generational workforce has a unique set of needs, and the younger generation is leaving digital prints of their voice everywhere- right from discussions on collaboration platforms to their redemption behavior on benefits platforms. Organizations must intelligently tune into these sources of data, apart from just the direct survey data and continue to refine and upgrade the rewards experience. Data and technology, if used correctly, can provide an integrated, dynamic and hyper-personalized EX to employees at scale.

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Employee Engagement Software

How to Ensure High Adoption of an Employee Engagement Platform

adoption of an employee engagement platform

Every enterprise employee uses a range of applications during a single day of work. These can include email, chat, social media, payroll, appraisal, company intranet etc. Getting them to consistently use yet another tool focused on rewards and recognition can be an uphill task. However, to gain the maximum ROI from your total rewards program, high adoption of the platform is crucial. To achieve this, both the RnR software vendor and the organization need to ensure user-centricity in the platform design and proactively iterate platform components as usage matures. This blog covers the multi-faceted process of making your employees adopt an employee engagement platform for the long term.

  • A great first impression

The onboarding experience of any technology platform is important to retain users for the long-haul. This includes an attractive UI, application tours, easy navigation, even rewards for first-time users/first time downloads.

  • Customizable Workflows and Reporting

Any employee engagement platform needs to be tailored to the organization’s culture and bring the firm’s values to life virtually. This means digitalizing offline rewards, administrative and approval processes and also creating role-based dashboards and reports. The more saving of time and efforts that the platform offers to an employee, the more likely they are to keep returning.

  • Gamification

Gamification has proven to be a game-changer when it comes to platform adoption as it triggers the goal-gradient effect in users, making them take the next logical step towards winning a digital badge, or upgrading to an elite level club of employees after winning certain rewards. Having leaderboards in employee recognition tools also boosts public esteem, which triggers the human drive to defend self-worth.

  • Integrations

Integrating the engagement platform with the right kind of inhouse applications can result in seamless reward workflows, resulting in successful adoption. Integrating with data systems like the HRMS, Payroll and Appraisal portals are crucial for relevant, real-time data synchronization. Other frequently used apps like email and chat are also powerful ways to bring employee recognition and rewards front-and-center with employees by preventing logging into various platforms to give a simple real-time recognition to a peer.

  • Communications

Timely triggers to employees in the form of communications outside the platform are necessary to give just the right amount of push to employees to use the platform. This involves sending emailers before the platform launch and regular updates in terms of additional features and usage. Organizations can also trigger occasion-based communications via email or SMS wishing employees on birthdays or anniversaries, encouraging them to redeem their gifts on the platform.

  • Platform Support

Support throughout the user lifecycle is an important determinant of any platform’s usage. This can take the form of a responsive helpline, helpdesk or ticketing system as well as training materials for all kinds of employees. The lesser the amount of hiccups in a user’s workflow, the higher the chances are of the platform being used.

  • Rewards Experience

The reward redemption experience on an employee engagement platform needs to be memorable and impactful. Having run-off-the-mill, stale products can drastically affect redemption rates. Making employees feel special involves giving them relevant reward choices on their terms- they decide when they redeem reward points and how, whether through clubbing them with cash, opting for e-vouchers or ordering their physical gifts to a location of their choice.

  • Leadership Buy-In 

Finally, platform adoption is known to receive a great boost when it is promoted by senior leadership. The relevant teams need to ensure that the senior management is well-aware of the ins-and-outs of the platform and are promoting it by using it themselves.

Promoting the usage of an employee engagement solution is an integrated effort that requires planning and patience. Flexible, easy-to-use, customizable and buildable solutions are known for high adoption rates and can be evolve as per organizational needs and business scenarios. All in all, it is important for any solution to become an integral part of an employee’s daily functioning, instead of being a simple nice-to-have tool.

Categories
Rewards and Recognition

Importance of Having Flexibility in Your Rewards Platform

flexible rewards program for employee engagement

The definition of total rewards for employees has changed over the years, and encompasses a broader scope including employee recognition, incentivized learning and emotional wellness. However, firms have been slower to move in this direction. According to Deloitte, only 11 percent of employees globally believed that their rewards strategy is highly aligned with their organization’s goals. This discouraging number was found in 2019, before the challenges of a virtualization and increased stresses due to the pandemic came into light.

With the disruption of workplaces, the need for a robust employee recognition and rewards program is paramount to engage and retain top talent. However, to truly increase the ROI of the program, customizing your engagement platform to match your organization’s values is essential. Having a ‘default’ software solution implemented in the firm will always leave you with a wish list of features and functionalities that can’t be fulfilled. No two firms are alike in terms of rewards workflows, behavioral values to encourage or even employee preferences when it comes to selecting rewards. Following are just a few examples in which a flexible recognition software can be configured to meet specific requirements:

  • Hyper-personalized Rewards:

Catalog curation can be done based on employee demographics and their mapped preferences. Moreover, reward options visible to an employee can even be configured down to the location/department/hierarchical level. These can range from shopping vouchers and experiences to offering the option of donating points to the firm’s CSR initiatives.

  • Nominations and Approval Workflows:

The nominations procedure in each firm varies across award categories and frequency. An efficient software platform can configure workflow rules to allow self-nominations, criteria based automated nominations, multiple levels of approval, auto approvals etc. This ensures that the end-to-end process is digitized, lending complete top-down transparency into the rewards process.

  • Segmented Surveys:

Surveys can be targeted to certain relevant sections of the employee based on the questions to be answered. Tired of adding individual recipients from a particular team, department or even coming up with new lists for new joiners, employees who have been with the firm for 5+ years etc? A customizable platform helps you automate segmented surveys and trigger them at defined milestones.

  • Budgeting:

Budgets for rewards often face drastic changes when faced with business highs and lows. Moreover, business unit budgets can often change depending on factors like team growth, performance and attrition. Thus, it is imperative for a platform to be able to adjust to changing budgets by changing reward points present with the unit administrator on a real-time basis.

  • DIY Adaptations:

 An internal platform administrator can only become a sole owner once they have complete control to edit platform functionalities to meet their exact needs. From creation of badges and recognition categories to determination of points associated with each category, DIY abilities give the organization command over the framework while saving on the costs of building a customized system internally.

A successful rewards platform is not only strongly aligned with business goals and organizational culture but is also attuned to changing employee needs. A hybrid workforce means that flexibility in total rewards is going to be the only way to keep a remote workforce engaged. Agile businesses need to digitalize their offline rewards to offer a rich, relevant rewards and recognition program that appeals to a diverse employee base. As the focus shifts from rigid, employer-driven incentives and benefits to more individualistic, performance-based incentives, digital platforms can help managers view performance metrics, offer quick feedback and stay better connected with teams, giving a decisive advantage to not just engagement but business performance as a whole.

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Channel Partner

Engaging Sales Teams in the Pharma Sector

channel partner engagement

Way before our rapid advances with the COVID-19 vaccinations, the Indian pharmaceutical industry has been a flagbearer for creating affordable, effective solutions for the global healthcare industry. However, with economic volatility and increased competition, the pressure on sales teams of these firms has been tremendous. In fact, the very relationship between brands and secondary sales networks has changed over the decades. Earlier, pharmaceutical representatives were the primary source of clinical information about drugs. Today, such information is often sought online. Purchase decisions are also influenced by payers like insurance firms and customer preferences, which means that distributors need to engage multiple stakeholders in the health industry value-chain. Additionally, customers are increasingly looking for a differentiated value proposition from pharma companies and given the increased workload on healthcare providers post COVID-19, getting the most out of sales meetings is crucial for closing opportunities. It is more essential than ever before to ramp up channel partner incentive programs to boost pharma sales.

A channel partner and sales incentive software can help in creating, gamifying and automating a payout program, while engaging sales networks digitally, in the following ways:

Data Visibility

Data visibility, while a common challenge for sales leaders across industries, is heightened in the pharma industry due to geographically distributed operations and dependency on manual/legacy systems for reporting sales data. A SaaS platform will ensure real-time data visibility for the company as well as its’ partners. Visibility can even be down to seeing performance region wise with the help of geotagging facilities.

Complex Incentives Structure

The pharma sector has typically focused on commissions as a source of incentive for sales team, rather than a fixed base pay. However, with the added aforementioned ‘influencers’ in modern pharma sales like online portals and patients’ brand perception, it is difficult to determine the percentage role of a frontend salesperson in closing a deal. Also, the KPIs for channel sales has to evolve with market needs, like value-added services and customer retention, which most incentive systems are incapable of accommodating. A channel incentives platform can structure complex incentive quotas and track multiple KPIs for a single employee, making the program fairer and more relevant.

Automated Calculation and Payout

Manual errors in calculation and distribution of incentives can be eliminated with a channel incentives software, irrespective of the complexity involved. Such software also has in-built performance analytics capabilities, allowing companies to easily measure the ROI of the incentives program at various levels. This granularity of data thus helps in bifurcating sales strategy at the national and regional levels.

Flexible Program Rules

With constant changes in the life sciences and pharma industry, it is of prime importance for companies to stay flexible in devising their sales strategy. If the company chooses to drive a single-product, like immunity-boosting vitamins for COVID-19 recovery, they can get focused reports on product performance, whereas if the focus is on overall profit-generation, commissions can become margin-based. A robust software helps support these essential changes and support C-suite leaders at a strategic level.

Sales Enablement Tools

Finally, a unified digital platform can help maintain alignment in a virtual world, wherein the latest product launches, clinical information, videos and marketing collaterals are accessible to channel partners with a few clicks. This information can then be passed to customers through social media/email/WhatsApp with ready integrations for seamless communication. In fact, a study shows that Indian doctors are most receptive to information in the form of videos shared through WhatsApp.

Information technology has resulted in a more informed customer base and digital selling of healthcare drugs too is a slow but growing trend in India. However, medical representatives still have an indispensable role in the pharma sales cycle and can leverage the power of relationship-building to engage their customers. Companies must remember that only an engaged workforce can deliver a delightful customer experience. A channel partner engagement software can help with seamless engagement and incentivization, while saving significant administrative costs for pharma companies.

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Channel Partner

Engaging & Incentivizing Channel Partners in the Insurance Sector

channel partner engagement

The insurance sector in India is growing at a rapid pace due to the rise of a young, security-conscious, insurable population coupled with favorable regulatory interventions by the Indian government. Policies like 100% FDI allowance, increase in basic premium rates and open architecture have boosted competition in the sector. As per the pattern followed in most competitive industries, there has been a major influence of IoT and innovative ‘InsureTech’ to improve direct insurance sales channels via innovative technical interventions. However, according to PWC, for both the life and the non-life insurance sector, the majority of sales is still accomplished through face-to-face channels like brokers and agents. These channels are not being optimally leveraged, partly because of the continuous change of stakeholders. Studies show that attrition in the insurance sector was predicted at 60% in 2020, the highest among all formal sectors. Primary challenges like lack of collaboration, transparency in data and targeted incentives can only be overcome by adopting technology for structured channel partner incentive programs. Following are some of the benefits insurance firms can get through a channel incentives platform:

Increased Data Transparency

Information flow across hierarchies and functions increases the trust between the management and the agents, thus boosting brand loyalty. This can be facilitated through user management, real-time sales campaign data and role-based dashboards. Agents/dealers get complete visibility into how their rewards are calculated and how their performance measures up against their peers. Collaboration tools like discussion forums and announcements can ensure effective two-way communication regarding new policies, schemes, products etc. These factors equip sales teams to learn more about the differentiators of their products in an easy-to-understand format. Sales enablement documents can also be accessed easily accessed through a single portal.

Data and Analytics

Often, firms are unable to make sense of customer data and sales numbers, which can be a huge opportunity missed for an insurance firm. With data being captured in multiple formats and systems, a powerful BI tool is essential to collate the myriad sources and present them in a readable, prescriptive format. A channel partner management software comes with in-built reports and analytics, which can help both the firm and agents get crucial information at the right time. For example- agents will know about the best performing products real-time, which can help them make recommendations on the field and close sales opportunities faster. For the management, reports can be used to determine the progress of a region, zone, cluster, teams and also individuals.

Automation

Automation helps in the smooth running of sales campaigns and significantly reduces the need for manual intervention for sales and incentive management. For example, automated notifications for milestone achievement and target reminders can keep channel partners engaged and motivated. Accurate incentive payouts are often a cause of friction between finance and sales teams. Incentive calculation for complex networks including the internal sales team, bank tie-ups/cross selling, independent agents or website conversions can all be done through a single channel incentive software within minutes. This ensures a seamless workflow saving time, manual efforts and avoiding workplace conflicts.

Instant Rewards

A channel incentives software comes with increased options for dealers and agents to choose their rewards from. Reward catalogs can be curated and customized as per industry needs and give channel partners the freedom of choice for their rewards. A robust system offers the options of payroll additions, instant e-voucher deliveries and high-value physical products to the persona’s homes. Since rewards are linked to live performance data, pay-outs can be configured for each milestone, instead of making agents wait till the end of the campaign, resulting in higher engagement and gamification of the sales process.

Manual methods of channel partner engagement are no longer feasible for the fast-moving insurance industry, where best-in-class customer experience is important to gain an edge. Centralized data and automated workflows can prevent incentive calculation errors, delayed commissions and ensure program measurability, resulting in increased channel loyalty and overall success.