This personal digital coach nudges your sales team to target

Ravi Bhamidipati and Ramesh Srinivas had been colleagues at PwC. Both had extensive experience in the corporate world and on the consulting side. One day in 2014, Ramesh says Ravi called him and wanted to discuss an idea. They met at a coffee shop at Bengaluru’s Forum Mall and after a half-hour chat, Ramesh says he was convinced by Ravi’s idea and agreed to joining up to start a venture. That is how Worxogo Solutions, a company that has developed an AI product to improve performance of salespersons in companies, came into being.

“We did a little bit of research before starting the company,” says Ramesh. “We caught up here and he (Ravi) said he had this idea for what then was called gamification. He said it looks interesting and said he was thinking of starting a venture and asked me if I wanted to join,” recalls Ramesh.

The idea behind

What was the idea behind Worxogo? Ramesh says companies are keen to improve productivity of their employees, especially those in sales. The companies try to mechanise as much as possible and bring in the latest technology, they standardise processes so that everybody does the same thing, in the hope that they get more efficient. This de-humanises the whole effort as it does not take into account that each individual is different and reacts differently to situations.

“Ravi and I have done a lot of these transformation technology implementation. The point of failure is never the technology or the process. The point of failure is the people,” says Ramesh. This is what they wanted to solve through Worxogo.

Ravi was convinced that using technology was the only way it could be achieved, where each individual would be treated differently and AI and machine learning would be used to send individual messages of motivation. According to Ravi, companies had brought in the latest in technology and one would imagine that with technology and process in place, things should fall into place for the best results. “But the perplexing thing we always discovered is that we were not getting the results to the extent we would have that the process and technology were capable of,” says Ravi. Studies revealed that the shortcoming could be as high as 40 per cent. This got him thinking and he discussed the issue with experts in the field. Just like you put process design and system design in place, you also need to put in place something called behaviour design, he adds. Ravi and Ramesh decided to use AI and machine learning to create something like a personal coach. Most runners, says Ramesh, will have a coach. The job of any coach is to track how a sportsperson is doing, set targets, guide him or her to achieve those targets, so that the outcome is satisfying to the sportsperson and the coach.

“We said why don’t we use the same concept in organisations. But instead of training people to be good coaches, why don’t we use AI to create a personal digital coach to push employees,” says Ramesh. This works well as most people are convinced that a coach has your best interests at heart. Worxogo’s application tries to mimic a good manager without being judgemental. It uses analytics to figure out what actions a salesperson can take to improve performance. Each salesperson is measured on performance parameters.

How it works

Worxogo, which sells its products to companies, uses data from the company to figure out what each salesperson is expected to do on a given day and sends out personal nudges. Worxogo’s application takes data from the company, does analytics for individual salespersons and narrows down 2-3 priority actions that will help the salespersons hit their target by sending out nudges through a mobile app. The way the message is phrased is as important as the content of the message, points out Ramesh.

It is a cloud-based pure B2B SaaS product based on a per user, per month subscription model. It has got about 40 customers with one lakh employees on the platform using the product. The company hopes to launch the product in the US this year, with some minor tweaks to suit that market.

“The final frontier to performance is moving from intelligence to action,” says Ravi. Employees are overloaded with data and analytics. They are also overloaded with recommendations that come out of the data. It is the intelligent way of using data that will help drive performance.

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