Hello and welcome to our pre NRF interview with Steve Kramer, CEO
and founder of Work Jam Were sat actually lost out.
We're stood in the very lovely location just round the corner
from NRF Asia. Steve, I forgot before we go,
are you actually expiring or are you here as a visitor?
We are at Expo, we're speaking at the event, we have a booth at
the event and we were really excited to be part of the first
NRF in this region. Our fantastic.
Well, listen, without Fergie, why don't we maybe start
unpacking a little bit about who you are?
How did you become a CEO, founder of Work Jam?
Sure. And then we'll focus in on on
Work Jam. OK, great.
Well, I, I've been in the retail technology business for around
25 years now. So we started our first company
in 1999. It was an ecommerce software
company called icongo based in Montreal, Canada.
I'm, I'm from Montreal. Cool.
And we grew that to become one of the global leaders both in
retail ecommerce platforms as well as B2B commerce platforms.
We learned that up merging in 2010 with our European
competitor called Hybris. So icongo became Hybris.
We went on to become the dominant player in the industry
for enterprise commerce technology and ultimately landed
up exiting test AP in 2013. OK, so I stayed on at SAP for
two years, loved it. SAP is a phenomenal
organisation. And, you know, after two years,
I wanted to get back to something entrepreneurial.
I missed being, you know, close to customers.
I wasn't in that role anymore and building something.
I couldn't do anything in ecommerce as a result of some
non non competes that I had. So I started looking into what
else was keeping executives up at night.
And as I spoke to a lot of retail executives, you know,
people in the manufacturing distribution areas and so forth,
I found that the workforce actually, this was like in 2014
was a, was something that was causing a lot of anxiety.
And you had millennials just starting to come into the
workforce. Yeah.
And people were were worried about that, how we gonna
communicate with millennials. They're very different from, you
know, from the traditional worker in the US You had
President Obama that was starting to take notice around
the social economic issues, around unfair scheduling
practises for hourly workers. Yeah.
So I noticed this. It was a it was an interesting
time where there was a really a transformation that was needed
around how organisations were communicating and managing with
their frontline staff. Yeah.
And, and as a result, we, we took the concepts of e-commerce
and really applied it to workforce management to create a
experiential platform, a transactional platform for
frontline workers where a large organisation would be able to
better manage their hourly staff, their non desk workers
and and drive better results in their business.
No. Well, fantastic.
So you definitely have the entrepreneurial bug.
You can't as as much as you try and work in the corporate world,
it's durable, but not where where your heart is.
So I mean, tell me something like what are the problems that
when you're you must meet so many retailers and I'm sure you
can meet a bunch of retailers here.
What's the thing that they come for you to solve?
They're, they're, they're solving business problems.
They they're driving, they're trying to achieve operational
efficiencies, they're trying to cut cost.
That comes in the forms of either task management, where
they have use cases around compliance in the field that
they're trying to solve. They are predominantly right now
also trying to communicate better with the field.
That that was a factor that was like an impact effect of COVID.
Yeah, right. Like when COVID happened, there
were very few tools out there to be able to communicate with the
frontline. On processes.
And that's. Right.
They didn't have a process to actually talk to the frontline
area managers maybe. Yeah, they had E-mail Manager
might. Put yeah, because they had
e-mail addresses, right. But frontline employees, they
don't have e-mail. They don't have the tools that
we have his desk workers. So it's operational efficiency,
it's communication, it's learning comes in those forms.
Flexible scheduling is another area where they're coming to us
around solving business issues. Ultimately, as we get into
conversations with prospects, we start unfolding other issues
that are happening in the organisation.
And you know, the frontline is a underserved market right now.
75% of companies have not invested in and their frontline
work tech and, and, and when they have, they've landed up
with a a disparate group of applications that a frontline
employee needs to use. So on average, we did a study a
couple years ago with Forrester Research.
On average, companies around the world have 4:00 to 5:00 apps
that are frontline employee needs to use in order to do
their job. Wow.
And we've seen it up to 8 or 9 in some cases.
And it's hard enough being a frontline employee.
Imagine having to use so many applications on the floor of a
plant or an addition, you know, a distribution centre and a
retail environment to do your job.
So consolidation of apps simplicity is a is a very big
focus that we are seeing as well in the industry, right.
Now that's fantastic. I mean, as I said, how do you
find, do you get in terms of your, do you get to spend time
with the store associates or the store managers as part?
We do, yeah. We'd love to visit stores, we
love to hear about, you know, what is important to them.
The reality is, is that the hourly workers know so much
about the business. They know about the problems,
they have ideas on how to solve them.
So being able to speak to the hourly associates and our
prospects or our customers is a is important to us to start, you
know, to continue to innovate in our product to build these
operational tools, but also to help organisations figure out
the digital transformation that needs to drive these
efficiencies that they're looking.
For and do you think retailers in terms of the outcomes can
sort of focus in on some of the like real world examples where
something that surprised you that you know, when we, one of
your customers, you, you you saw went in to do one thing and you
you came out with something. Else, I mean, one of our
customers, JCPenney and in the US, they're large big box
retailer, discount retailers, around 70,000 employees.
The project that we've started with them was really around
flexible scheduling and being able to have an open shift
workplace where employees are, they get their core schedule,
but they can pick up an extra shift, they can work at a
different location than than their primary location.
We coupled that with communication tools and that
those communication tools had a profound impact on the culture
of JCPenney. Yeah, but also the level of
engagement and loyalty to the organisation.
I think it was. I think the impact was much
wider actually than JCPenney ever anticipated as well.
So in addition to labour optimization through flexible
scheduling, JCPenney actually had almost a 10% reduction in
attrition. Wow, that's a big number.
You know, like in retail, on average in in many markets that
cost anywhere between 4:00 to $5000 to recruit and train a new
employee. Yeah, if you can reduce your
your turnover by that those types of numbers.
A significant amount. Millions of dollars that scale
the number of referrals that they began to have from
employees telling other other friends or colleagues that they
should join JCPenney tripled. Ohh wow.
And an environment where there's still a labour shortage.
It's very difficult to find skilled workers.
That's very important. So we see a lot of these things
where they're solving one business issue.
But when you give the voice to the employee and they feel, you
know, part of the culture. Yeah and they feel like they
understand the head offices goals has a big impact on on the
business and and on those employees lives.
Yeah, absolutely couldn't agree. And I I think, you know, Target
used to talk about the number of devices that their colleagues or
team members Adam belts, yes, you know, they have the walkie
talkies, they had the the handles.
So just to focus in a little bit on the tech you what what device
you see on your agnostic? It's it could be bring bring
your own device. So a lot of our customers.
Have Android enable. Yeah, yeah.
Android, Apple responsive on on web as well for both mobile and
desktop use. We often sit on shared devices
in the stores as well. There we have a kiosk version of
Work Jam as well that is kind of always on for our location.
And so there's a lot of deployment optionality.
We're also able to sit inside of other collaboration tools.
So if you're using, you know, Teams as an example or your
managers are in sales force, we can actually bring Work Jam to
those users rather than bringing the users to Work Jam and having
another app that they need to use.
And many of our customers tend to deploy in a hybrid model
where corporate might be using Teams for their desk workers,
which could go down to, let's say, manager level.
Yeah, managers will use work Jam inside of Teams, but the field
is using work Jam native. OK.
Yeah, I think and I think that the the focus has to be for
success on the experience. Yeah.
Yeah, final two questions. In terms of obviously you, you
hold the company. The company is 9 years.
Old, so nine years old and you specifically just focus in on
scheduling communication. I'm just curious, are you would
you move into other areas like can't you do task management or
we? Do yeah, we have 5 main pillars.
So the five main pillars are we have two way communication, head
of communications. Here is that voice text.
That's everything from social network within the app to
messaging, chat channels, OK digital doorways into other
applications in the organisation.
We so so two way communication is pillar number one.
We do task management that goes well beyond just traditional
task that goes into audit capability and and also being
able to integrate with other applications for for task
completion schedule management. So we tend to sit on top of core
workforce management applications to expose
self-service capabilities and open shift marketplace
capabilities and then learning and lastly as earned wage
access. So it is a modular system.
Many of our customers will start their digital transformation
with let's say one or two modules.
Yeah. And then they tend to grow into
the rest of the application. This is quite comprehensive.
The final question in terms of when you look to the future, not
only where you want to be, but in terms of the future of the
store associate, how do you see that you have a a vision like
what how how you see an empowered because I've saw see
that's where you're about empowering the frontline.
I'm just curious what how you see the future.
Of well, I, I think that First off, I don't think AI is going
to replace the frontline worker, but I believe that AI will have
a profound impact on how organisations operate and how
the data that is being collected and the actionable insights that
come out of AI can really elevate an organisation to the
next level. Is for us as an organisation,
we're investing a lot in, in AI. We're constantly investing in
the experience. I think the experience is what
drives the type of adoption that we're seeing in our customers,
which is typically around 80% daily active usage of the app.
No, why? That's kind of like blowout
numbers compared to an intranet, which is 20 and 25%.
And for us as an organisation, we're going global.
So we are a Canadian based organisation.
We have many customers, large customers in the US, in
Australia, in the UK. Southeast Asia for us is a a new
market that we're opening. We already have some large
customers here. But you know, we feel as though
the problems that we're solving, they're not regional.
These are global issues. Yeah.
In Singapore, where we are today, the retailers that we're
speaking to have the same problems as the companies in New
York and London, in Melbourne. It's a human.
Problem. It's a human problem.
Exactly. OK, so more humanistic there's I
mean, we're going to go for a complete into but coming back
from Shanghai and what what I learned there was it doesn't
matter what technology can do, you're still gonna end up with
human problems. Well, listen, it's been
absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for allowing
giving giving up some time before.
That's great view here. Yeah, thank you.
Hopefully I'll see you at the show.