Start-up of the week | Engazify - A bot for real time feedback and appreciation at work

Who doesn’t like to be appreciated at work? But the current performance management is the most difficult aspect of a manager's role. It’s a nightmare to execute a good strategy to track performance and drive results within the team. It all could be attributed to the data captured being never “real-time”, thanks to the unnecessary forms that are made to be filled out. Microsoft, GE, Accenture, Adobe are all getting rid of Annual Performance reviews since the data is expensive & not relevant, it is delivered quarterly or yearly. Accenture spent $32 Million alone last year on their annual performance management process and have already scrapped it as the outcome was not at all great. This post becomes quite relevant now as with the advancing technologies, there might just be a solution to all those next-gen workforces who hate filling out forms and expects real-time feedback and recognition for their efforts. This is where our startup of the week- Engazify, with its Engazify bot comes into picture. It addresses right what you need-- simple, automated and artificial intelligence powered solutions in this industry!

Let’s find out more:

A bot for real time feedback and appreciation, Engazify makes it easy for teams to appreciate hard work & share feedback based on the company’s core values. The bot works in the background and automatically detects positive behavior from team conversations and even notifies everyone while keeping a score of everything through a fun leaderboard.

Intelligent enough? Well, AI is what we can be thankful to! The bot can get real-time insights into the team’s performance and a weekly summary with a trends report that can keep the managers updated on what’s working and what’s not. It works exceptionally well for the managers as it even shares a performance risk alert for them to take immediate actions. The bot’s AI technology and machine learning capabilities can remove the dependency for managers to manually analyze thousands of feedback messages, by automatically finding patterns and gaps hidden within the data. This gives managers and HR teams the ability to see the engagement trend and the performance risk areas within the organization. And not to forget, it gives managers enough time to derive a new strategy to mitigate the risks and boost employee productivity and engagement. Working on a freemium model, it allows to use basic set of features for free whereas premium set of features including advanced analytics and more customizations can be availed at a certain price per month.

The startup challenges:

The current performance management processes being stringent and ineffective, the first task was to simplify the whole user experience and the feedback capturing process. Another challenge was to build a solution catered towards the employees as they are the ones who will be sharing feedbacks, and at the same time help the managers with useful insights and analytics to help them get the most out of the data that is being captured. “The biggest challenge was to get all these things done through a simple and easy to use bot. And we have managed that exceptionally well”, says Siddharth Shekhawat, CEO & Co-founder at Engazify. [quote]“Another big hurdle while building Engazify bot was that the whole bot industry was at a very nascent stage. There was hardly any information or help available online. We had to build out our own framework and AI engine to get the bot to work. Currently there are many such frameworks & technologies available which are plug & play, but not when we started out Engazify bot. It has actually worked out for us as we now don't rely on any outside service to power our bot, the complete bot experience is managed by us in-house”, added Siddharth.[/quote] On being asked how has the bot been received so far, Siddharth exhilarates “We have seen exponential growth ever since our public launch in August '16. Our user base has been doubling each passing month with feedback shared increasing at 98% month over month across all teams.” “We have some amazing clients all over the globe using Engazify bot, including Citrix, Office Depot, Schibsted Media group, Multiply, Usana, Dun & Bradstreet, and DBS bank. And all this growth has been organic without any spend on paid marketing”, he confessed. The startup is currently bootstrapped and funded by the founders itself, however, they are actively seeking funds and are open to talk to investors who are looking to invest in an awesome bot startup revolutionizing the way performance is managed in organizations. “We plan to scale up our engineering team and also increase our marketing efforts with this fund, Siddharth concluded.

Some of its unique features:

• Engazify bot is platform agnostic, i.e. the technology they are building can be availed through their web platform or it can be integrated with existing platforms in the market. The bot is integrated with leading communication and collaboration platforms like Slack, Microsoft teams, Skype, etc.
• It works in the background automatically detecting positive feedback from team conversations.
• Removes dependency on filling out forms to share feedback, making the process real time and on a continuous basis.
• Weekly summaries with a trend report, auto reminders to share feedback, alerts for performance risk areas, advanced analytics, and more power to drive the culture you want in your team.

On a concluding note:

The Performance Management industry is primed for disruption and the intelligence that is being developed will help organizations solve the biggest problem of managing their human resources. An artificial intelligence powered bot which can facilitate feedback in real-time and through simple conversational interface is a small but very important step in reducing the time & money spent on performance reviews. It is already benefiting organizations all over the globe and Engazify wishes to make larger impact. Check out Engazify bot by adding it to your Slack team today!