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Interaction with Jason Mosakowski, Vice President, International, BI WORLDWIDE on India office driving BI Worldwide’s business globally

Jason is a seasoned global executive with senior leadership experience spanning sales, marketing, strategy, operations, and general management in the…

Interaction with Jason Mosakowski, Vice President, International, BI WORLDWIDE on India office driving BI Worldwide’s business globally

Jason is a seasoned global executive with senior leadership experience spanning sales, marketing, strategy, operations, and general management in the software, manufacturing, and healthcare industries. He’s held executive roles in North America, China, and India for Fortune 50 companies leading business transformation and market expansion of those businesses. In his current role, Jason oversees BI WORLDWIDE’s international operations including sales, marketing, client services, finance, HR, IT and operations across 7 regions: APAC, Australia, Canada, China, EMEA, India, and
LATAM.

 
BI WORLDWIDE is a global leader and India’s foremost in providing technology-enabled loyalty and engagement solutions to its clients for creating and sustaining engagement with their employees, channel partners, and customers. The company provides solutions and services in Employee Engagement, Sales and Channel Effectiveness, and
Customer Engagement.

 

Q1. What brings you to India?  BI WORLDWIDE successfully completed 10 years of commercial operations in India with a 40% CAGR growth, what are your future expansion plans for India. Are you looking at any Mergers & Acquisitions?

India remains special for me both from personal and professional standpoint. In my previous leadership roles with other global conglomerates, and specifically with IBM – I had spent considerable amount of time working in India, understanding the cultural preferences, talent & skills availability, business nuances, and enterprise customer
behaviour to drive growth.

For BI WORLDWIDE, India is one of the top markets growing steadily over last 10 years with an excellent 40% of CAGR growth from the commercial operations. We continue to focus on growing our business in India and doubling our revenue in next 5 years by bringing in innovation, hiring and developing talent, amplifying service delivery, investing
in domain research, and new products and technology. Alongside there are new business streams making inroads to India market with learning solutions, brand merchandise and gamification solutions to inspire our client’s key stakeholders – employees, channel partners and customers. As an organisation, BI WORLDWIDE has always relied on the power of behavioural science, data, technology, and customer centricity. To ensure we continue to break new frontiers, we have made investments in bringing new capabilities, technology, andresearch to empower our clients to take decisions based on science and data, and not assumptions to drive measurable results. GTS – Global Technology Solutions, BI WORLDWIDE’s COE for developing and delivering world-class technology solutions, has recently moved into a new tech-centre for greater collaboration, innovation, and new-age tech products development. Driving customer centricity, participant experience is core to our business in India and across the globe. BI WORLDWIDE India has moved
into a fully operational call center set-up with comprehensive portfolio of participant experience solutions and services backed up new-age technology, systems and processes ensuring total participant delight for clients.

To further accelerate the pace of our growth in India, we are open to exploring opportunities with organisations having relevant synergies in place, having a purpose to help clients grow their business, and having a laser-sharp focus on delivering measurable results.

 

Q2. What drives the leadership position for BIW in India and internationally? What innovations (products/tech/process) BIW has brought into the market for driving results wr.r.t employee engagement and channel loyalty programs?

BI WORLDWIDE is a global leader & India’s foremost in delivering measurable tech- enabled loyalty & engagement solutions inspired by applied behavioural science. BI WORLDWIDE globally serves over 8.6 million participants and 300 clients (7 out of the top 10 fortune 500 companies) across 164 countries.

In India, we are serving close to 100 fortune 500 brands with more than 90% renewal rate and 86.5% participant satisfaction score. Over the last 10 years, BI WORLDWIDE India got recognised with 18+ international and global awards for best-in-class loyalty and engagement programs. BI WORLDWIDE India has successfully completed 10
years of commercial operations with a 40% CAGR growth and continues to be amongst the top solutions providers in employee engagement, channel loyalty, and sales motivation domain. Owing to our culture, people practices, and employee value proposition, we recently got awarded with the Great Place to Work certification 2022-
2023.

India is amongst the top 3 growing markets for us, to ensure we double our revenues in next 5 years we have expanded India leadership team by having Sukesh Jain as the CEO while Siddharth Reddy continue as the Managing Director for BI WORLDWIDE India.

 

As a market leader in India and in other international markets, BI WORLDWIDE continues to look at innovation as a main driver of our accelerated growth. Post pandemic, brands and organisations have gone into the hybrid mode of managing people and business. Consumer behaviour is changing everyday with apps delivering groceries to everything else under 10 mins to their doorstep. Everything has become NOW. That’s the expectation. BI WORLDWIDE invests a lot in market research, innovation, and development of new products to meet the changing expectations of consumers.

With this new hybrid workplace environment, two of biggest challenges have emerged. First, keeping employees engaged between those coming to the office and those who are not. Second, how to ensure managers are trained & equipped to manage this hybrid workplace environment and expectations of their teams ‘equitably’. Using BI WORLDWIDE’s flagship employee engagement digital platform – DayMaker, brands can decode the hybrid workplace ambiguities around driving engagement, recognition and manager awareness by giving them tools to deal with this changing work environment in the most effective manner. Here’s a few you should look at: Recognition NOW! – Managers used to rely on tools & comfort zones at the office, but that’s not there anymore. Recognition NOW, our clients can quickly and easily send a note of appreciation, give points, or shop for rewards in work programs like Outlook, Facebook, Teams, Slack or Yammer.

EZ Thanks App – The need of the hour is to be mobile. Recognise on go! This makes sending recognition to the coworker’s fun, fast and easy, directly from your phone. Equity & Inclusion Advisor – Individualised manager insights for more equitable and inclusive recognition. Recognition Advisor – Guide managers on how and when to provide recognition that is more meaningful to employees from start day and beyond Public/Social Recognition Wall – social media is ingrained in everyday life, so much so that’s only natural that it is extended to the workspace. Wall with names of the recognised employees with their achievement get flashed on the social recognition wall so that the whole organisation gets a view of people getting recognised and for what specific reason. Peers can like, comment, and even share these recognitions.

Celebration Page – Let’s create a celebration page to cherish special occasions and memories like Long Service Award, Birthdays, Anniversaries, work anniversaries, special event winners and more. More so relevant in this new era of digital
transformation.

Q3. With your recent launch of Global Technology Solutions Centre at Chennai, how do you see India office driving BI Worldwide’s business globally?

BI WORLDWIDE’s Global Technology Solutions (GTS) tech-centre designed for smart collaboration, innovation, and for developing tech talent within the organisation, is a game changer for us and specifically for BI WORLDWIDE India. GTS serves all markets and clients of BI WORLDWIDE internationally with world-class technology solutions including program technology deliveries, new product development, analytics capabilities, and rewards marketplaceplatforms. This new age tech-centre gives us a unique benefit of leveraging local talent for delivering our loyalty and engagement
services to clients in the city, across India, and globally.

At present, BI WORLDWIDE India’s GTS office employs more than 150 associates and is swiftly growing its headcount to achieve an expansion target of 20%. It is a great value proposition for all international BIW markets in terms of accessing exceptional tech talent, better cost efficiencies, and saving time for project deliveries. It adds to our
overall revenue growth – for the international markets and for India specifically. We are looking forward to leveraging this new tech-centre to achieve our goal of enabling both our associates and clients to thrive, inspire and achieve business results through tech- enabled loyalty and engagement solutions.

Q4. Loyalty & engagement programs have been around for a while, what has changed in the recent past and how has covid forced the brands to look at these strategic interventions differently?

Yes, a lot has changed. Covid-19 has certainly forced every brand to re-look and re- define their engagement, retention, performance, and growth strategies to keep their best customers, channel partners and talent (employees) engaged and inspired. A lot of changes came in – digital transition, great resignation, focus on wellbeing & compassion, value creation. remote working, virtual world for everything business forcing consumer and talent market to change their behaviour and accept the new order of the world. What did not change is how brands look at loyalty, retention, and
engagement to keep growing, and keep increasing the overall CLV from end users of
their products.

Brands had to give a hard look at their current loyalty and engagement programs and made them all digital or at least hybrid driven by digital interventions like virtual events, digital engagement platforms, online product launches, app/web-based customer query resolutions, value creation through online learning systems. Although sales numbers
were hit, brands which took care of their employees, customers and channel partners with compassion, wellbeing initiatives, safety guidelines and family benefits to deal with in difficult circumstances emerged as preferred brands to be associated with.

BI WORLDWIDE has everything ready to support their current clients and market to weather this storm by quickly moving them to best of digital infrastructure, virtual events platforms, app/web-based programs, online learning modules, virtual product launches, digital recognition, gamification contests to drive sales, and a comprehensive online
rewards marketplace to ensure they continue to drive engagement and measurable
results.

Q5. We hear that you use Behavioural Economics & design code to devise loyalty and engagement solutions. Can you give us a better understanding of this.

Behavioural Economics is at the core of everything we do at BI WORLDWIDE in India and globally. From program design including tier structuring, incentive design, contest frameworks, goal settings, to program delivery including communication, rewards, promotions, learning, to program optimization including data mining, cross-sell, up-sell,
gamification and more – everything is driven by behavioural economics principles and theories. The use of analytics, learning, goal setting, communications, awards and measurement help us to validate the positive impact that the proper application of Behavioural Economics can create. This really helps us to drive change in behaviour with our clients’ end users – employees, channel partners, and customers and help them with measurable results.

Design Code is BI WORLDWIDE’s proprietary human centric program design methodology, developed by infusing design thinking techniques and tools, into our domain expertise on employee rewards & recognition, engagement, behavioural economics, and EVP research. This methodology is based on 3 different stages driven by research, empathy, ideation, and finally the solution that stems from end-user insights and all the way co-created by the client and BI WORLDWIDE’s team. Some of the world’s fastest-growing companies across diverse industries such as IT, ITES,
Retail, Travel, Finance, Agriculture and more have leveraged the power of Design Code™ to create comprehensive solutions focusing on employee-empathy, leading to measurable results.

Q6. What are the emerging trends when it comes to rewarding people? Does cash score over non-cash rewards in driving engagement with program participants?

‘Experiential’ reward is the buzz word, specifically when the world is coming out from the grip of Covid-19. Customers, employees, and channel partners, like all of us, are finally ready to travel and experience various aspirational things that life has to offer. They want to indulge in luxury, travel and high-end experiences and events to live life to the fullest.

 

The range of experiential rewards starts from local experiences to events to travel, people are willing to go extra mile to experience one of these or even all of these. When it comes to travel experience, 93% of people are motivated by more choice in destinations, 88% of people are motivated by more choices in when they can travel and 85% of people are motivated by experiences led travel – e.g., music concerts, sports, food tours, outdoors. Brands should focus on introducing experiential rewards to their key stakeholders – employees, channel partners and customers to keep them inspired, engaged, and motivated and eventually turn them into brand advocates to gain more.

Cash rewards only take motivation to a certain extent, it is non-cash rewards and incentives that inspire and engage brand’s key stakeholders to the highest level of performance. Business leaders are dealing with changing consumer behaviour owing to external market environment and recent pandemic forcing them to rethink and realign their engagement strategies. BI WORLDWIDE globally work with eminent academicians from top global universities such as Dr. Ran Kivetz from Columbia University Business School, Dr, Brad Shuck from University of Louisville, Dr. Joe Gladstone, University College London and more to understand what really motivates people and bring that research into practice to drive change in human behaviour. This is where we bring in our research-based rewards efficacy framework to help brands structure their rewards mix for maximizing the impact of their engagement programs. Rewards Efficacy
framework states all reward type produce results, however non-cash rewards are more effective at producing desired results – incremental sales, engagement, and loyalty.

One of the factors of behavioural economics Sociability, that comes along with non-cash experiential rewards which drives a greater behavioural impact that gets extended to family members and how they also get involved with the overall rewards experience – short vacation, getting a new car, sponsoring a child education or even health care
rewards. Cash is purely transactional and limited to only an individual with no re- consumption and sociability factor.

 

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