CXO of week: Tanmaya Jain, Founder & CEO, inFeedo

InFeedo is a SaaS-based analytics company that develops an employee engagement platform for enterprises. It has employee engagement and experience and work with over 225 companies globally. Some of its customers include GE Healthcare, Genpact, Tata, MakeMyTrip and more. This is backed by Tiger Global and other institutional investors.

Customers use its conversational AI platform Amber to measure employee engagement, sentiment analysis and more through different touchpoints and milestones of an employee's lifecycle in the organization. With Amber, organizations have been able to retain 85% of their top talent, have a response rate of 91% and more.

Recently we have engaged in an interview with Tanmaya Jain, Founder & CEO, inFeedo. He talks about his journey so far and what inFeedo has been up to.

Introduction.

We began our journey in 2013 when Varun (Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at inFeedo) and I were still in college. We have raised ~$16m from VC firms such as Tiger Global, Jungle Ventures and independent investors - Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Zeta, Girish Mathrubootham, CEO & Founder of Freshworks, Piyush Bansal, Co-founder, Chief Executive and People Officer at Lenskart and Benjamin Ling, Founder & General Partner at Bling Capital among others. Today, more than 225 enterprises globally use Amber. Some of our customers include -Tata, Samsung, Airtel, Lenovo, Xiaomi

How customers are using inFeedo's Amber to see clear and measurable ROI?

Amber is a SaaS platform that uses contextual and conversational AI to uncover hidden gaps in an organisation’s culture and teams. She is deployed at scale as the Chief Listening Officer and reports directly to the CEO. Her Conversational AI and people analytics capabilities help HR leaders control attrition by understanding how employees really feel, uncovering the real sentiment and gaps, especially for the top talent. Using Amber, customers have been able to retain 85% of their top talent, get 33X quantifiable ROI and save 2.5 days on an average in a week, for an HRBP.

For example, one of our enterprise customers which has been using Amber for over six years, faced multiple challenges post-merger. The leadership deployed Amber to connect with their 3000+ employees in real-time and gauge employee sentiment patterns post the merger. With the help of Amber they were able to increase their retention rate to over 10% and had an 80%+ response rate. Similarly, another long-term customer once told us - “Even if I tripled our number of HRBPs and they spent 4X the hours with each employee, that kind of insight would NEVER have come.”

What, as per you, are the five important things that inFeedo should be looking at today?

The employee market has changed dramatically in the last decade. Today employees are demanding much more. Traditional HR practices are no longer enough to cater to 21st-century employees. As a leader in employee experience, we help people-first leaders build better relationships with their employees and get meaningful insights from employee feedback so they can take action in real-time. As a result of this, we are extremely focused on:

1. Co-building with our customers to leverage the power of AI and solve existing business challenges for CHROs
2. Investing in our people science capabilities and into the depth of our product
3. Adding capabilities that the market demands, such as burnout management. We recently partnered with Arianna Huffington’s Thrive to enable customers to proactively manage burnout, and it is now rolled out to all our customers globally.
4. Becoming the one-stop solution for employee experience for CXOs, and the safe space for employees to express themselves
5. Helping people first leaders build a culture where employees love to come to work

How organizations are using AI to engage employees and improve their experience?

Gone are the days, when traditional, non-contextual employee-HRBP connects, or anonymous, one-size-fits-all surveys could help build the right company culture. Organizations need to build a listening culture at scale, unearth hidden sentiments, act on employee feedback faster, and be able to retain and engage with employees better. With a rise in disengagement and increased attrition, HR teams are adopting Conversational AI to get actionable insights and add predictive capabilities to manage today’s workplaces. For example, Amber remembers feedback and contextualises every conversation accordingly. This helps build trust with the employees and results in better engagement. Global economic trends such as the Great Resignation, and now Quiet Quitting have disrupted the traditional workplace. This has led HR leaders to re-imagine employee experience and retention strategies through the adoption of Conversational AI.

What changes is inFeedo bringing to the industry?

“Interacting with Amber is done so well, it feels human, it feels natural, it feels like I am talking to someone who is listening to me.” This is a quote from one of our long-term enterprise customers and truly sums up how Amber is unique and the change that we have been able to bring to the market. In a crowded market of AI platforms, Amber’s conversations feel real, and employees have a safe space to open up and talk about their challenges. Because our customers deploy it as a Chief Listening Officer, and the way that Amber is built, it shows empathy, has the capability to understand complicated feedback, and brings powerful insights to the people teams. As our mission statement states, we want to make the voice of 100 million employees heard & valued.

Tell us about inFeedo's expertise in Conversational AI and how it is different from other players in the market?

Amber uses the GPT3 language model coupled with our proprietary algorithm LexScore, built in-house. This boosts the accuracy in context-specific cases by up to 90%. A part of our chat flow and conversations with employees is adaptive, and we have kept another part knowingly static to ensure HRBPs don't have to deal with hygiene issues during data analysis.

Most organisations follow a typical year-end survey which may not be the best way anymore to capture feedback. Amber, on the other hand works on an employee lifecycle model. She reaches out whenever an employee completes a milestone, such as a work anniversary, with relevant and contextual questions based on our Employee Experience Framework developed through extensive research by our People Science team. This sets us apart from the other players in the market. Not only is Amber’s conversations more personalised, but it also brings in a unique context from previous conversations. This has resulted in employees trusting Amber and sharing honest and transparent feedback.

What are your strategic plans for FY 22-23.

Retaining top talent remains a top priority for employers even in turbulent markets and for that reason we have aggressive growth plans across two areas - market expansion and product innovation.

From a market expansion point of view, we want to double down on the mid-market and enterprise segment with organisations that have employees in the range of 500 to 120,000, and expand our focus to the US. We have been able to successfully capture the market opportunity in South East Asia, and we have already started seeing success in the US. At our last fundraise, we wanted to grow 6x in 2.5 years and we are on track to achieve this.

From a product perspective, we want to continue investing heavily in to the depth of our existing product. With more than six years of experience in people science research, and a unique mix of people science and conversational AI teams, we have been able to stay a step ahead of the competition and we will continue to innovate and expand on our product leadership.