Corporate Perks & Benefits

Changing the employee benefits landscape in India!

Continuing the series, this time the focus is on employee benefits & retention.

Mr Sharma, Head of HR in a large Bio Tech Firm in Bangalore was a worried man. 2 years  back, when they have set up the development center with 500 plus people capacity, they had expected an easy ramp. And it was. In one year flat, the blue chip brand name and good image in the market, ensured that they achieved the year one ramp plan of 1200 employees. It was in the few months subsequently that things started going downhill. Employees would not blink before resigning and moving to competing firms for as low as 15% increments. Introduction of innovative benefits like Free food in Cafeteria, shuttle service for people staying back late, etc. were just not ‘WOW’ anymore. That’s when he got the call from Sourabh @ Advantage Club. The differentiation offered by Advantage Club was a clear winner among the employees.

Mr Sharma is not alone. Employers today are trying hard to find innovative ways to win over their employees. Historically, benefits such as health coverage, retirement programmes have fared well. But with 60% of today’s population consisting of youngsters around age 25, times have changed with the youth asking: what beyond that? Nevertheless, HRs are devising new strategies for employee attraction & retention through attractive benefits & privileges.

Lifestyle perks, unlike traditional perks should be ones that the workforce can use in their everyday life: like day-cares, hospitals & gym, restaurants, grocery etc.

So what’s stopping corporates in doing this in-house? Challenges like:

• Contacting brands and Negotiating exclusive offers
• Missing analytics
• Promoting them among employees
• Cost of the entire operation, time and efforts incurred by the team
• Different categories of offers excite different types of population
• Contract renewals
• Issue resolution at 10pm in the night or on a weekend

For the brands, corporate clientele is a niche & attractive segment, but hard to get. Brands do not have an entry in corporates and even if they do, constant in-company promotion with such a closed-door audience becomes a challenge.

For the employees themselves, having too many options sent over to them on emails is a pain point as remembering the exact perk when they need it becomes a challenge. Issue resolution at odd hours is another problem altogether.

Enter Advantage Club: A mobile-first employee benefits platform which solves all the above problems by bringing the employees & the brand together through a marketplace model.

As India’s largest employee benefits provider, it is successfully running in more than 150 corporates including Accenture, IBM, Concentrix & HCL.

Few ways they’re solving the above-mentioned problems are:

• With exclusive benefits in 2200+ brands, covering 12+ categories
• App based platform, identifying the employee through corporate email
• All personalized benefits available through apps and website, updated realtime
• Add family members to the corporate perk plan
• Location-based push notifications to inform users of perks near them
• 365-day phone based customer helpline available to employees
• Real-time dashboards to both HR’s and Brands for usage-monitoring and tracking
• On an average, a user can save upto Rs.65,000/year through Advantage Club.

Advantage Club is now going beyond employee-perks to the customer-perks segment as well. By providing brands an option to pick and choose TG’s based on their preference, their goal is to revolutionise the customer loyalty and happiness industry by adding a tech-angle to the way we spend and save in India. They currently have a strong presence in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai & Bangalore and have started expanding to Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune & Kolkata.