From IKEA India to MG Motor, this startup’s workforce management solution finds many takers

How many times has a customer care personnel stood you up after promising to come and resolve your problem? In fact, 89% of those interviewed by CSG International, a Colorado-based business support solutions provider, suggested that they would prefer an “Uber-like” tool that provides technician location and continually updated estimated arrival times.

This preference is also reflected in the Customers 2020 report by Walker, a customer experience consulting firm. The report suggested that the customer experience has overtaken price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Customer care, therefore, is that last link of an enterprises’ chain which has the power to rattle the entire chain. And it is this last link that a year old startup wants to untangle for enterprises. Zuper is an enterprise mobility platform which enables organisations to manage, modernise and transform field and remote workforce.

“Customers no longer want to wait for a 4-8 hour window for the service technician to arrive; they are expecting up-to-the minute information about events, wants to be notified when the technician is on the way, what time the technician will arrive and how long it will take to complete the job. But, when it comes to field service, organizations are struggling to meet the growing demands of the customers resulting in huge loss of revenue and customer churn. Organisations are encountering multiple challenges dealing with field workforce,” says cofounder of Zuper, Anand Balaji.

Industry experts, shares Balaji, put this market at a massive $30 billion. “There are 1.8 billion field and mobile workers across the world and more than 85% does not leverage technology. There is no clear leader in the industry,” adds Balaji.

Zuper entered the field in August 2016 and already has a list of impressive clients – IKEA-India, BVG Group, UDS, Modern Foods, Ferrero Rocher, Fipola, Mahindra Finance, Carriers, and more. Organisations using Zuper, claims Balaji, have increased workforce utilisation by over 50%, reduced service turnaround time by over 35%, increased customer adoption and profitability by over 45%, operating more efficiently and reduced costs by over 30%.

What is Zuper?

Zuper is a mobile-first, cloud-first B2B SaaS offering which can be used by organisations of any shape and size. The platform offers many plug and play modules to organisations to enable them to manage their workforces. Some of the most popular modules are: remote timesheet management with facial and voice biometrics. “We are the first platform in Asia to offer voice biometrics based remote timesheet management of field and remote workforce.Organisations can leverage fit for purpose applications and experiences to connect the entire workforce whether the employee is on the field, dispatcher or in the back office. Other than the timesheet scenarios, the biometrics capabilities are deeply embedded with the rest of the workflow, llowing organizations to perform real-time identity verification to ensure the right employee is at the right customer location,” explains Balaji.

Zuper offers work order management, smart scheduling & dispatching, real-time location tracking, inventory management, knowledge management, real-time identity management, remote timesheet management, customer management, alerts & notifications, and more of such capabilities.The company also provides offline mode support for critical operations to counter patchy network in India allowing users to perform their tasks. The platform also offers integrations with major CRM, ERPs, Payment Solutions, IoT devices, Smart Home Appliances, Cloud Telephony, etc. “The platform can essentially integrate with any applications, devices and tools to ensure the companies have a full 360-degree view of their field originations and can operate at the highest level of efficiency and productivity,” says Balaji.

Zuper also comes with a predictive analytics engine that helps organizations forecast their work-orders, and schedule smartly. The company has also received a provisional patent and IP protection for their ML based smart scheduling and intelligent & automated diagnostic system.

“Our goal is to enable organizations to “Zuperise” field workforce and dispatch the right field person to the right place at the right time with the right knowledge and tools. Transform customer experience and business with connected field service,” summarises Balaji.

On its way to ‘Zuper’ growth

The startup was recently awarded the “MG Drives Innovation Award” by MG Motor and is now in talks to develop a solution which will help the British auto company to improve their after sales offerings.

Offering these solutions the startup has built a good traction and has onboarded over 40 customers across India and some from Singapore, making the number of end users over 6000.

However, Balaji says the company is just starting up, given the growing size of the opportunity. “In India alone, this is a $5 billion opportunity. Over the last 12 months, we have travelled across the country, from Madurai to Chandigarh and met over 500 small, medium and large businesses to validate our hypothesis. The problem is real and the opportunity in both tier-1 and 2 cities across the country is huge with no market leaders,” asserts Balaji.

While the company already has scored their first international client in Singapore, it will soon expand its footprints into other countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and the Middle East.

“We have taken this strategic decision to boost our sales, decrease time to market and get access to competitive markets. We plan to launch the product with direct sales and marketing in the Northern US by the first quarter of 2019. This is a huge $30 billion worldwide opportunity,” says Balaji.

All this growth and traction has been achieved by investing their own money so far, but the founders have plans to soon knock on the investors’ doors. “We will start our funding rounds soon. The goal is to raise a pre-Series A round by mid-2018, and scale the business,” informs Balaji.

The plan is to keep evolving the platform and provide the latest technology to their clients to enable remote workforce management. The founders are also in the process of building an operating system for field and remote workforce management. “The future of field workforce management is IOT enabled connected devices and smart homes. We are actively working on enhancing the platform to enable Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality capabilities to offer an immersive and powerful experience for enterprise customers to ensure they can provide the most powerful tech to their field and remote employees to be the best in their business,” says Balaji.

Name of the Company: Zuper

Name of Founder (s): Raghav Gurumani, Karthik Rao, Vijay Narasimhan, Anand Balaji

City: Chennai

Revenues: Rs 1.2 crore (2017-18)

Headcount: 10

Industry: Enterprise Mobility

Investors Details & Amount raised: Bootstrapped