9 Lessons Healthcare can Learn from other Industries
Team HE brings to you best practices that Healthcare can espouse from other industries
In today’s technology savvy world, lines between industries are getting finer. The healthcare industry has undergone a transformation in the last 20 years and people in India look to Dr. Devi Shetty and Dr. Prathap C Reddy as doyens of effective leadership. However, there are key leadership principles that are displayed by other sectors that could help the healthcare sector enhance its approach. Here’s what CXOs of other sectors share as key takeaways for leaders of the healthcare business.
Sasha Sanyal, Strategy and Process Excellence Leader, Genpact,Information Technology
1. What is the best practice that the industry has adopted to downturn the cost curve? How do leaders ensure that efficiency and effectiveness go hand in hand?
A key management goal is optimising the cost structure. The biggest cost line items can always deliver a bit more. People cost is the largest cost element in a service industry like ours; hence, we look at driving various initiatives to enhance efficiency here. In order to maximize agent productivity, we design effective incentive structures aligned to client needs and operate with an optimal employee pyramid with the right level of supervisory support.
By setting up stringent contract compliance teams to limit margin leakage across different stages from sales to delivery, you can actually turn tables on competition. Genpact has leveraged digital interventions to increase the level of automation across processes, hence reducing costs. A strong governance mechanism and project management rigor is critical to ensure that cost initiatives are scalable and sustainable.
2. What are the new approaches to attract and retain employees?
Our employees are our most valuable asset and we diligently invest in their overall development and growth. Our well defined employee value proposition is themed “employee development” and this helps us attract and retain talent.
Talent availability is the heart of our location strategy. We have storefronts across the country to attract and hire the best talent. We have a centralized hiring team that is deeply involved in tapping the best from the market across multiple channels. We also hire talent from niche programs like Young India Fellowship and tie-ups with universities. To create gender diversity in Genpact, we have come up with initiatives like ‘Returning Moms’ to provide flexible work options to retain our women employees post their maternity break. One example of a women centric hiring initiative is Career 2.0, which is a global campaign aimed at bringing talented and experienced women back to the corporate world. We have also been very focused on in-house gateway programmes to hire and upskill employees across niche skill sets. This again helps us optimize cost.
Technology is rapidly changing the world and these changes impact both the organizational workplace and the work itself. A constantly changing business environment impacts the role and format of learning. Therefore, it is important to stay ahead of the curve. To keep pace with this change, we are shifting our people practices using big data, mobile capability, gamification, online open courses, etc. to enhance learning and performance across levels.
3. Successful companies have always been customer-centric. But in an increasingly competitive environment, how do they focus on customer experience?
We strongly believe in collaborating with our customers across levels to understand their business needs and become a true partner, than a vendor. Genpact’s LEAN Digital approach combines our core strength of process and domain knowledge with design thinking, technology and analytics, enhancing client satisfaction. We recently launched Innovation Lab at Palo Alto where leading Fortune 500 companies are co-innovating with us to solve business priorities.
We also take pride in our high NPS (Net Promoter Score), which is not a metric for us but a way of life. We also capture customer feedback both at CXO and Process Owners’ levels and act on it with rigor and passion. To further enhance our customer experience, we use immersive digital interventions like telepresence robots, virtual reality techniques, etc.
4. Is precision marketing an effective tool for attracting more customers?
We pitch our solutions based on our target audience – for instance, while dealing with CXOs our solution focuses on overall business impact e.g. reducing cost to serve, claims payment time; for process/ business owners, our solutions focus on specific process level impact of our products/solutions e.g. touch time per claim.
5. What are some of the compensation strategies that have paid off?
While compensation acts as a lever to keep employees motivated, enriching learning and career enhancement opportunities help an employee grow professionally and personally. It motivates employees in the long term and creates value for companies. Employees contribute much more when they feel they are aligned to the organizational goals and vision, and when they have the right environment to innovate. So, fostering an environment of openness, flexibility and meritocracy acts as a catalyst in creating value for the employee, client and the organization.
6. How do you deal with the resistance of introducing new ideas in the organization?
Creating a shared vision is the most critical element while introducing any new idea/concept across the organization. This shared need has to be followed by reiterating the vision across multiple forums to ensure people accept it in their way of working. This has to be supported by facts such as why it’s critical for them to embrace it and what if they don’t.
Ranveer Brar, Celebrity Chef
1. What are some of the best practices adopted by the hospitality sector to bend the cost curve?
The biggest challenge for a hospitality team is to crack a viable business model that will attract customers. One attribute that has helped many brands build their business is their aggressive sales pitch and lower setup cost. Many entrepreneurs are cutting down on decor and using the money as working capital. Most restaurants are also focusing on establishing more outlets of the same model to achieve efficiencies. It becomes easier to replicate standard operating procedures across a chain and ensure lower costs. The food trend in the country today is earthy, and not exotic. Regional and seasonal food is trending and technically these are not expensive ingredients to deal with. This also helps lower costs.
Lower setup costs using a rustic feel as a catalyst ensures higher working capital for restaurants. The fine balance between efficiency and effectiveness is achieved by processes and documentation at every step.
2. What are some of the new approaches used for attracting and retaining employees?
Business needs have always driven labour cost in the restaurant industry. Most large companies intervene at the education level by coordinating with colleges to include a small course that covers the company processes and nitty gritties to get more ready manpower. Earlier, education was disconnected with the industry. So, when a young graduate joined the workforce, he was in for a rude shock. These days, most organizations do a culture insemination at educational institutions, which allows students to absorb the ethos of a company and fit in better.
3. Successful companies have always been customer-centric. But in an increasingly competitive environment, how do they focus on customer experience?
The line between retail and restaurant is blurring. Today, a restaurant focuses on the customer experience as much as a retail showroom. Dining experiences are becoming differentiators in the restaurant space. That’s why most restaurants focus on designing an experience for the customer. The fact that a customer experience drives revenues and takes care of the costs is imbibed into the DNA of hotels and restaurants. Good companies start with costing out an ideal customer experience and then working backwards.
4. Given the size of the pie, is there a conscious attempt to use precision marketing?
Hospitality business cannot be created to please all; usually a very clear defined set of people is what all of us go for and the best way to get our customer is to go where he goes. In today’s case, it is the digital space and social media. Entrepreneurs understand market segmentation and target a specific age group like families or double income no kids (DINKS). There is definitely lot of cross-promotion occurring in the space.If a restaurant focuses on GenY, they will try to tie-up with a Hugo Boss showroom.
5. How much of your focus today is on investing in incentivizing employees?
I think the challenge here is defining “value” and creating a clear and tangible system that ensures a clear structure of incentivization on value creation. There are several factors about employee performance which cannot be measured easily. For instance, it’s really hard to find out how many people left the restaurant happy or recommended it to other customers.
6. How do you manage traditional roles versus new plans which at times might not align with the goals of other senior members?
The biggest and best buy has always been projected numbers. But today, senior management understands other currencies like brand equity and marketing value. Showing currency gain as a result of a new idea always works.
A Vijayasimha, Committee Member, Lemelson Foundation (Engineering Sector)
1. What are some of the best practices adopted by the sector to reduce costs? What have the your personal big lessons?
There are so many best practices in the engineering industry that healthcare managers can easily replicate. Many healthcare companies are trying to adopt lean principles, six sigma and process capabilities, which has taken the automobile industry from a sweatshop to a very sophisticated engineering entity.
The automobile industry has heavily invested in Total Quality Management (TQM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). It has also developed an extremely professional set of tools to ensure high quality of products.
Efficiency basically means that something should come out in the best quality in the shortest time. Japanese companies consider time wastage as a major loss. A factory worker should be able to find components of a part in the least time. Many private healthcare providers have adopted lean six sigma principles in their hospitals. This is adopted from cellular manufacturing of the automobile industry. Cellular Manufacturing is the process where equipments are positioned in a manner that one can track the number of steps a factory worker has taken to do a particular job. If you report a car breakdown to an automobile company like Toyota, the service mechanic will reach you faster than ambulance.
2. What are the new approaches used to attract and retain employees?
Job rotation is not possible in a healthcare company because talented people are in short supply. Infrastructure is one of the ways in which organizations attract talented employees. For healthcare organizations, it would mean acquiring expensive equipment like a Proton Therapy machine.
3. Successful companies have always been customer-centric. But in an increasingly competitive environment, how do they focus on customer experience?
Every patient demands personalised care and his/ her experience depends on soft skills and training of clinical and paraclinical staff. In a tertiary care hospital driven by an assembly line kind of process and increasing use of lean six sigma concepts, there is a need to incorporate so called “human elements”. The hospitality industry to a large extent has lent its experience and personnel in building this into hospital processes.
4. Is precision marketing an effective tool to attract more customers?
The health seeking behaviour of a person is completely different from a consumer buying behaviour. For instance, if a patient is not satisfied with a service/product he cannot throw it out of the window like a TV. The basic principle of healthcare is that you need to trust before you even walk into a hospital. The parameters that usually matter are reputation of a doctor/ hospital and advice from friends and family. The automobile industry uses data to ensure best quality output. This in itself is enough for the brand. If reputation is built, the brand is built.
5. How do these companies sell their new ideas/ concepts to the senior management?
In every sector, change occurs thorough validation. It is difficult to introduce changes without a process. If I want to introduce a nut into an aircraft system to hold the engine up, the time it takes to validate that nut is almost one-and-a-half years. If you want to change a small thing like temperature of a forging unit, it takes minimum one year in the automobile industry for experts to validate it. An engine production plant of an automobile company will conduct testing for at least a year before introducing a new part in the market to ensure the processes are optimal and provide the right quality.
Bala Murali Krishna, Senior News Editor (who was most recently Executive Editor at International Business Times)
1.What are some of the best practices adopted by the media sector to bend the cost curve?
Media, among other sectors, has been under greatest pressure in recent years on account of significant and ongoing losses to digital advertising led by Google and Facebook. Much of the cost-cutting has reduced the scope of coverage (number of pages in newspapers, for example). But it would be foolish to believe it has not impacted quality. Having said that, the pressure on costs is leading to a lot of efficiencies not seen before when the media enjoyed a monopolistic position in most markets. Better technology, notably the Internet, helps journalists raise efficiencies. Where a reporter would be able to publish just one article, he is often able to publish two or even three articles.
2. What are some of the new approaches used for attracting and retaining employees?
If media companies have a broad policy to retain talent, it must be a well-guarded secret. How else would you, for example, explain the way TV channels marginalise or drop knowledgeable and able but older women journalists?
3. How do successful companies manage hiring niche new talent by keeping costs constant?
Growing campus recruitment is the way many media companies have gone in recent years. They get to evaluate a wide array of talent and pick up able candidates at modest costs. Even if the trainees work for one to two years, companies derive a lot of value, with quantifiable economic benefits.
4. Successful companies have always been customer-centric. But in an increasingly competitive environment, how do they focus on customer experience?
This is one area in which remarkable improvements have taken place in recent years. More publications are in tune with their audiences, or at least are trying to. The Times of India is clearly a leader. But there is a flip side to it. On TV, this has led to a whole lot of noisy channels, and in print, the phenomenon known as Page 3-ification.
5. Is precision marketing an effective tool for attracting more customers? How have experiences of working in media, shaped your outlook?
Yes, this seems intuitive. In the media, this takes the form of more targeted advertisements, which means you know a lot more about your readers. It’s all about analytics. If a media outlet can deliver more targeted adverts, they can charge higher rates.
6. Does compensation try to create more value for companies?
Increasingly, compensation in the media is based on how much traffic each reporter or department is able to drive. So, typically, when a journalist is hired, his compensation includes a base salary plus incentives based on how much web traffic he or she is able to drive. There is usually a cap on the maximum incentives one can earn but generally, higher the traffic levels, higher the compensation. This works very well for media firms because they earn more advertising income as web traffic goes up. It also helps companies keep their overhead salary costs lower.
7. What do these companies do to sell their new ideas/ concepts to the senior management?
ROI, or return on investment, is key to most new initiatives. But the media enjoys more privileges and is able to experiment so long as something is unique, and gives an edge over competitors.
Mansoor Ali Khan, Member, Board of Management DPS Bangalore and Mysore
1. You have targeted the education market right from beginning. Was it not daunting? What are some of the best practices adopted by the sector to bend the cost curve?
The best practices adopted by the sector to bend the cost curve is facilitating sustainable platforms to ensure the best minds in our own system can vet solutions. Administratively, centralisation of shared services like internal audit and construction management have largely helped to bend the cost curve. Moreover, we have made the most use of our institution’s size to negotiate better prices for products like software, furniture, computer equipment, etc.
Research and expert thinking has helped us understand how students learn, like benefits of visual stimulation. Keeping this in mind, personal instruction is augmented with technologically driven interactive tools. Buying our own Samsung tabs for learners brought down operational costs of adaptive learning programs through Mindspark. Keeping in mind operational costs of facilitating EduComp in schools, which consists of providing Smart Boards in classrooms, development of content and maintenance, we are buying our own Smart Boards and developing our own customised content which will go a long way to bend the cost curve considerably. If this experiment is successful, it will be implemented in all classes. This can become cost-effective and enhance efficiency because teachers will be given the opportunity to map and develop their own content according to the aptitude and pace of their students.
We communicate and collaborate as a team in order to achieve shared goals. We try to align curriculum, instruction and assessments in ways that facilitate synergies to foster student learning. The faculty designs, utilizes and reflects upon research-based strategies and material. Our staff has created Entrar – the web-portal. School staff, parents as well as students operate this to access information, results, school news, achievements and announcements.
2. What was the big turning point for you in terms of new approaches used to attract and retain employees?
Promotion really is the most effective way to motivate workers. Sometimes, when promotions are not viable it can be cost effective to motivate workers with career advancement rather than with cash – like teachers travelling abroad to study and providing plenty of opportunities for professional development of staff, loans to staff, subsidised education for children of the staff, etc.
The strategic needs for acquiring, developing and retaining talent should flow from the education system’s improvement strategy, which usually includes an explicit vision of effective instructional practice and identifies key people needed to implement it. In a school, instead of hiring a coordinator, senior mistress, head mistress and Vice-Principal and Principal, growth and promotion is encouraged in the system wherein internal staff are trained and promoted to higher levels.
3. In an increasingly competitive environment, how do you focus on customer experience?
Turning a customer service strategy into reality is a key challenge for organisations, including schools where student and parent satisfaction plays a major role in sustaining the good-will of the brand.
Our teachers are the ones to leave a first impression – and a lasting impression – on students and parents. Schools intimately understand parent frustrations and know how issues can be resolved. Today, parents have the freedom to discuss their child’s performance with the teachers, and if not resolved at that level, they can approach the coordinators, senior mistress, head mistress and even the Principal, if required. Moreover, parents and teachers have the opportunity to actively involve in conferences like Think CIQ where they can actively learn about emerging trends in education, creativity, innovation in education and better parenting.
4. Is precision marketing an effective tool for attracting more customers?
Today, many companies are taking a more scientific approach to marketing, and treating it as a true business discipline. This means applying more consistency and precision to capture, analyse and manipulate customer attention, specific wants and needs. Today every parent wants the best for their child and when schools are able to highlight their academic achievement, co-curricular accomplishments, value-based learning, global adaptation of students through print and broadcast media, parent feedback – this can be an effective tool for attracting more prospective parents.
5. Does compensation try to create more value for companies?
Yes, when employees create value, they definitely get more – not necessarily by salary hikes but perks like awards and scholarships.
6. What steps does the industry take to sell new ideas/ concepts to the senior management?
The learning curve is a powerful tool to use when announcing change to cautious team members. It can also be used for a number of other tasks, including communicating unpopular decisions or relieving tension between team members.
What companies can do is Pulling Or Pushing – ask people to openly talk about their resistance. Companies are working with people in the manner in which their brain processes information logically. So, instead of pushing what we want, visualize pulling people through the learning curve toward the desired result by motivation, transparency, appreciation and knee-bend-support during the process.
Harish Bijoor, Branding Expert
1. What are the major changes in the entrepreneurial ecosystem that you have witnessed in the last five years? What can healthcare adopt?
The major entrepreneurial mindset change in the last five years is really the fact that businesses have morphed from old formats. In the old days, it was all about Business to Business Commerce, then in came Business to Consumer Commerce, and now it is really the day and age of Consumer to Consumer Commerce. We have morphed from B2B to B2C to C2C. Healthcare has valuable lessons to learn here. Healthcare in the future is all about reliability and trust – two factors that used to be the high-grounds of healthcare management and delivery in India in the old days. Not anymore. Reinvesting these two aspects through C2C recommendations is the task ahead.
2. Many entrepreneurs say that in few years there will be two types of people – one, who are already in the mobile space; and two, those who will wonder what happened. Are you seeing lot of people on the sidelines?Would you see lot of opportunities for the healthcare sector?
Healthcare will move from the physical to the virtual. In the beginning, it was the family doctor in the street corner. Then came the bigger hospitals, followed by specialty hospitals. Now, things will morph slowly in two directions. 1) Back to the family doctor, and 2) Into the e-format. Mobile apps will treat a fair number of conditions, just as mobile apps will track and find a 360-degree solution to larger ailments. There is plenty of traction and money in the mobile space. mHealth is surely a way to go.
3. How closely should a healthcare brand track competition? What should it do to ensure that its innovations continue to be relevant for the industry?
Competition must be tracked, but it must not become the be all and end all. Today, hospital managements actively track competition and the number of beds filled across the street of competition. This is not enough. It is important for hospitals to manage the immediate hinterland of business. There needs to be a change in mindset as to who and what is competition. In the old days, competition was a geography. Today, competition is not a geography of operation anymore.
4. What are some of the branding mistakes made by healthcare companies?
“Me Too” branding is a big mistake. When you copy, you fail.
5. In what ways should healthcare companies tweak their strategy to reach out to Gen Y?
GenY is savvier than GenX, and GenZ will be more savvy. Old practices will be thrown out of the window. Healthcare companies need to think younger than they are able to think today. The young are discerning and damning. Quick to damn. And once the opportunity with the young is lost, it is difficult to recoup. Tweaking strategy to the young is all about making hospital care, medicare and medical psychological care that much more quick and efficient. Transparency is the norm of the young. Healthcare needs to tweak itself on that bit. You cannot be as opaque as you are.
Peter Yorke, Yorke Corporate Communications
1. What are some of the best practices adopted by the sector to bend the cost curve? How do they ensure that efficiency and effectiveness go hand in hand?
For Communications as a whole and Marketing in particular, I see automation as one of the key best practices that can be adopted. Using tools to monitor, measure and communicate lend a lot of accuracy to the communications process and ensure cost optimization. Targeting the customer is an important consideration where mass-based communication needs to give way to personalized communication through persona creation and targeting.
2. What are the new approaches to attract and retain employees?
If you consider the younger generation of employees, they need to be constantly motivated and challenged. Increasingly, employees want flexi office timings, work at their own pace and even have the appetite to manage multiple assignments simultaneously. As employers, we need to recognize this trend and move to a model that does not deviate from our core objectives but allow more flexibility in delivery. At Yorke Communications, for instance, we have recognized the potential of working with freelance consultants and enrolled more than 75 on our database. They operate from outside the company but bring interesting perspectives to our delivery.
3. In an increasingly competitive environment, how do brands focus on customer experience?
I think there is even more need to be customer centric and focus on delighting the customer in today’s competitive scenario. Customers aren’t loyal anymore, as they were a few years ago. They rely on their own information to make decisions – in fact 80% of the sales process is done before they even contact a salesperson or visit a store. Therefore information plays an important role as also constant interaction. These are the two key things to help in the customer journey.
4. Is precision marketing an effective tool for attracting more customers?
It undoubtedly is because the spray and pray approach is clearly the thing of the past. Relying on data to analyse trends and then marketing to customer segments in as customized and individualistic way as possible is paramount. I recently got a mailer from an investment company (clearly a marketing exercise) that specifically told me when I had discontinued my investment in terms of monetary value, in percentage terms and then asked me to continue the investment by filling in an accompanying form which had all my details clearly pre-filled in. Now that is really targeting and I am sure the conversion rate will be exceptional.
5. Does compensation try to create more value for companies?
I think it is a good idea to compensate employees for the work they do but pay them extra as an incentive or bonus for exceptional performance. This is a time-tested proven model. But what I think really works is surprising employees with something out of the blue. We once, as an example, paid for the air ticket of an employee who was performing exceptionally when he was traveling on his annual vacation! These small things make a difference.
6. What do companies do to sell a new idea/concept to the senior management?
Marketing always has the onerous role of showing returns on investment. Management looks at numbers. A highly metric-based performance roadmap helps in terms of showcasing the outcome of the program and getting buy-in from the management. Marketing can very often be looked upon as a very nebulous cost center. This myth has to be busted with a clear metric-based approach that demonstrates returns at every stage.
K Ganesh, Serial Entrepreneur, Partner, GrowthStory, Chairman - Portea Medical and Promoter - BigBasket.
1. What are some of the best practices adopted by the sector to bend the cost curve?
The sector has seen deep investments in technology and automating warehouses – investments in cold chain to extend shelf life, modern machines to sort and grade the produce better, and new packaging innovation. It has brought transparency and better realisation to players as well as benefited farmers.
Organised players have set up collection networks in rural areas and add value to the entire supply chain. Farmers are now empowered to check the consumer price on the online retailer’s portal before deciding to sell.
Wastage is rampant in the Fruits and Vegetables supply chain due to multiple intermediaries and handling, and the time taken from harvest to delivery at customers homes. The nature of this business model of direct home delivery has helped grocery retailers shrink the time taken from harvest to customers’ homes to less than 24 hrs, thereby leading to significant reduction in wastages in the supply chain.
Many perishable products with a short life as well as the needs and demands of the consumers changing from city-to-city also are a major challenge. Hence, it is of utmost importance to create a data-led offering that leverages information in a powerful manner. A wide range of products can be offered at competitive prices in what many say is a low margin industry.
Also, smart players like BigBasket have consciously avoided the trap of burning cash to create markets, and instead chosen to serve real customers who pay a real price that would make them profitable even in the short to medium term.
It’s very difficult to work in this segment if you don’t have visibility to inventory. You need to ensure that you are meeting large orders of customers. Keeping inventory is also important due to the “one-hour express delivery” as it gets difficult to keep a check on quality control with less time in hand.
2. What are the new approaches for attracting and retaining employees?
Attrition is highest among blue-collar workers since companies find it increasingly difficult to motivate staff doing repetitive tasks such as packing and delivering goods. BigBasket has established dormitory-style accommodation across India for its blue-collar workers, many of whom could be migrants. The lodgings are located near its warehouses and pickup locations. Shared housing can bring down costs significantly, especially when done at scale.
3. In an increasingly competitive environment, how do they focus on customer experience?
This requires relentless focus as it becomes particularly challenging once there is a rapid scaling up of operations, especially across the country as well as within a particular geography/ city. Using data to constantly get as comprehensive a picture of the customer as possible, extrapolating this with changing trends in the external environment and keeping up with changing expectations that may be fuelled by aspirations is key.
4. Is precision marketing an effective tool for attracting more customers?
Absolutely, and perhaps more importantly in this business in particular. The opportunities to transform a one-time customer into a customer for life is very high if the customer experience is unmatched.
5. Does compensation try to create more value for companies?
This is true of many industries and rightly so as the “heavy-hitters” are rewarded for the value they create.
6. How do these companies convince the senior management when introducing new ideas/ concepts?
It is absolutely critical and initiatives need to be designed ground-up with employees across all levels actively co-participate. Companies need to demonstrate how a particular move will add value to the employees themselves and allow employees the chance to “own” the initiative, or significant pieces of it.
Hari Nair, Founder and CEO, HolidayIQ, Travel
1. What was the experience of marketing your idea without exceeding the budget in the early years of online travel business?
The emergence of the online travel industry was driven by the ability to to reduce cost using online technology. For example, one of the big cost structure earlier was managing the customer from the time of booking. Today, most of the processes for booking an air ticket is managed digitally by an airline. There are two implications for this change – paper goes out of the window and manpower cost comes down.
2. What are the universal learnings about business and the Indian employee?
There are two-three things: one, every year we give high performers an opportunity to travel and write a review. However, that’s just a small part of our employee management strategy.
Two, top talent is always looking for a learning opportunity. They are always looking for a challenge in their job or else they get bored. HolidayIQ is a young company, so we face new challenges everyday and therefore we have been able to put young and highly talented people to newer problems on a daily basis. We also adopt a rotation process to ensure that people don’t get bored. Sometimes we lose a little bit of expertise by moving a person to a different function, but overall we gain in terms of the enthusiasm that the person brings to the team. Part of the solution lies in enabling employees to do different functions through training. We always look at skills as well as attitude and fit. Most of the old employees have the ability to fit in with a larger crowd. During the hiring process, we focus on “attitudinal fit”. However, it’s important to have people with varying social skills. It takes all kind of interesting people to make a good company.
3. During the initial years of a start-up, traction is often low. What kept you guys in the game? In an increasingly competitive environment, how do you focus on customer experience?
We use a systematic way of listening to our customers. Once you listen to the customer, it’s important to throw high quality talent at the specific problem. The team should be ideally multi-disciplinary. We have designers, journalists and videographers to solve an issue. Sometimes a singular group of people come up with solutions that might not really address people’s problems. You need high quality and multidisciplinary talent to stay ahead in the market.
4. What contributed to your success: was it business strategy-led innovation or was it because you started deep diving into precision marketing?
Companies like HolidayIQ throw the right content in front of an online visitor. We even know whether a query is coming from an expensive handset. Based on that we provide them details of a high-end holiday. Even if the consumer is not sharing details, the company will know what to recommend. For instance, for a customer based in Ahmedabad looking for a trip to Shimla, the first search result will be a review written by someone based on Ahmedabad.
5. On what compensation principles is the travel business being built on today? What’s your vision statement for HolidayIQ?
Our compensation structures are not dramatically different from other startups. There is a fixed and variable component and some employees are given equity.
6. How difficult or easy was it for you to introduce changes in the organization?
Customization is one of the core differentiators for our company. We service clients in a very customized way to create more value.It takes time to create such an architecture and it’s a challenge for startup.
Challenges of a startup is very different from that of an MNC. Simple things can become very complicated for a startup. Listening is the only solution to find out discomfort areas of employees in a startup. Every 45 days, employees get an opportunity to ask senior management any question that they have in mind.
Conclusion
An institutional framework that provides for formulation and implementation of plans at multiple scales can ensure that the vision of overall development of the healthcare sector as well as the needs of consumers is in sync or settled through dialogue. Hence, the challenges faced by the healthcare sector can be better addressed by an institutional framework that adopts best practices of other sectors and a management approach that prioritizes the convenience of a patient.