The enhancements to the StaffConnect platform make the management capability much more flexible and granular, which is of particular importance to larger customers.

Mobile employee engagement solutions vendor StaffConnect is announcing significant enhancements to their mobile platform with Version 2.4. The key enhancement is the complete rethinking of how the platform handles groups and permissions.

StaffConnect’s solution is designed to avert the negative consequences of a disengaged workforce by providing tools to measure and analyze workforce engagement accurately, and provide reports on employee engagement, productivity, and satisfaction. The idea is to link employee experience  to the customer experience, in order  to provide higher levels of customer satisfaction.

“Our product was designed specifically for this, and for deskless workers, not traditional desk-based knowledge workers,” said Geraldine Osman, StaffConnect’s CMO. “2015 was when we really developed the product, and we brought it to market in early 2016. In 2018, we had a phenomenal year, which reflected the facts that the market has matured a bit, with a space emerging with its own categories. This has enabled buyers to become more educated about it.”

That maturity has seen the market evolve in the last two years from where the major competitor was Do-it-Yourself initiatives, to a much more structured market with four or five established competitors.

“We differentiate ourselves in the market with our focus on two-way communication,” Osman said. “It’s particularly important for letting employees give feedback. We have integrated chat functionality for this where the other engagement solutions are mostly top-down communications. The Do-it-Yourself market we don’t see as much now, because it’s difficult to do, and companies that tried that tended to become customers about a year later.”

While companies with large numbers of deskless workers are an obvious target, Osman said they serve a broad spectrum of customers up and down market, and across many verticals, with healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality, construction and the travel sector being especially strong.

“In healthcare, the NHS [National Health Service in the U.K.] is a big customer, with NHS Trusts, which serve health care regions,” Osman said. “Manufacturing can go from companies of a few hundred employees to 40-50,000, while the hospitality and travel sector runs from small companies to ones with tens of thousands of employees.

“We see the need more frequently in larger organizations, but it’s more of a broader issue about personalizing things,” she added. “Even the small guys know making messages more specifically relevant to employees will make them more engaged.”

StaffConnect has multiple channels in addition to their own sales force.

“We are working with some Microsoft partners in relationships that were initially driven by customers,” Osman said. “Another channel is the employee engagement ecosystem – rewards and recognition people looking to put incentives into employee apps. The third channel is digital signage resellers. That’s a legacy technology for employee engagement, but our focus is on the mobile cloud-based technology.”

Improving the channel side of the business is a priority.

“We are working on it to grow that,” Osman stated. “Ones in digital communications don’t always know they are a channel, so that can make them harder to recruit.”

The major enhancement to the platform taking place now involves a complete reworking of how it handles groups and permissions, in order to make it more granular, which is particularly valuable for large customers. The platform now has 5,000 unique groups assignable to 100 unique categories.

“We have undergone a complete reimaging of how we set up permissions for different groups,” Osman said. “Because we are working with bigger enterprises whose organizational structure is complex, it’s important to provide them with the maximum flexibility for different management level and product-based teams. The idea is to slice and dice the audience, content and users in a much more granular way.”

This allows the customer to set up multi-level provisioning.

“That’s a big thing, and it feeds into the analytics that we can provide for different groups,” Osman said.

“It also provides extensive flexibility to mirror organizational structure, in environments like health, where doctors and nurses often don’t even have a computer,” she added.

Version 2.4 also contains new capabilities for custom audiences. This includes improved push messaging, with enhanced push notifications. It also includes targeting surveys and showing events either globally, or to custom audiences.

Version 2.4 is available now.