Role of technology to uplift the customer experience and to scale business
Technology is the medium to solve real-world problems. Businesses have already seen an advancement with the use of technologies
Abhishek Aggarwal, Co-Founder and Delivery Head at SpeckyFox Technologies India Pvt Ltd
Brief introduction about SpeckyFox
SpeckyFox is empowering startups, SMBs, mid-size and large conglomerates by bridging the gap between ideas and reality through technology. It offers end-to-end development services, ranging from strategic consulting to design, development, QA/Testing, and implementation services that are aimed to facilitate faster time to market and enhanced operational efficiencies, and turn vision into reality with the latest and emerging technologies.
The clientele is from eCommerce, e-learning, cryptocurrency, finance, logistics, travel, and social networking industry.
SpeckyFox is developing and has developed many web apps, and mobile apps with the latest software solution technology, allowing companies to easily transform their legacy operations in such a way that work becomes smooth and easy.
SpeckyFox is not only helping the clients in their businesses, but it is also investing in the startups and providing them a path and guidance to allow them to ideate to launch and post-launch support and ensure to deliver the competitive products.
SpeckyFox believes in innovative work culture and is on a mission to become one of the most professional, ethical, and trustworthy organizations with a great employee-friendly culture.
Within three years, SpeckyFox has successfully expanded its wings across different continents and is working with big clients and highly funded startups. As on March 31st, 2021, the team has worked for about 30 clients with a great satisfaction level.
SpeckyFox is trusted by its clients to address all their business needs using the fast-evolving and innovative web-based, ERP, mobility and open-source technologies. The performance driven team at SpeckyFox has extensive experience in all types of models such as fixed price, resourcing, managed services, time & material ranging across different geographical locations. Our vision is to enable our customers with the power of technology; to reduce the complexity of their businesses. Partner with us to automate your business and make it future ready.
One of the greatest strengths of SpeckyFox is our core values. We focus and keep on inculcating the values in our system.
- People empowerment
- We strongly believe that people empowerment is the key to success. People have all the tools and freedom to take decisions in their span of capacity.
- Passion
- We are forever keen to learn. whatever we do we do it with all our minds and energy
- Respect
- We treat everyone with respect. Everyone should be treated with dignity irrespective of the role or designation
- Trust
- SpeckyFox is a trust worthy team. Whether it’s the client or colleagues the team is always dependable
Do you see technology can help and improve the customer experience?
Technology is the medium to solve real-world problems. Businesses have already seen an advancement with the use of technologies. Revolutionary 5G technology already opens a lot of application areas like seamless virtual video meetings which help to keep the business running smoothly even during pandemic times. In fact, the non-IT businesses learned new ways to interact with their customers and started accepting orders using WhatsApp etc.
Technology not just solves business challenges but it helps with new and improved ways to do business. A few years back there seems to have been no need or desire to do online ordering of clothes and food. But if you look today, the e-commerce industry has already made an impact allowing people to not only order online but with AR (Augmented Reality) we can try the product virtually.
In fact, Indian SaaS companies are expected to create about 5,00,000 more jobs by 2030, the travel & hospitality industry 50 million jobs by 2028 and the FoodTech industry about 9 million jobs by 2024.
In the same line of thought, let us tell you one of the business challenges SpeckyFox solved. One of our customers who is a leading hygiene brand in India provides services to their customers at their doorstep throughout India. The client was maintaining and tracking all the appointments in form of excel sheets that were quite cumbersome and deceptive to manage. The mobile app that SpeckyFox developed helped them to automate the whole of this process with 100% reliability, transparency, and authentic data. This was implemented with the use of technologies like IoT and GPS to track and manage all the appointments and audit meetings with their clients.
With the use of this mobile app and reporting modules, the client was able to increase the quality satisfaction score by 30% in the very first month of its release.
Why do some companies not quickly adopt technologies? What are the constraints?
Learning Curve, Affordability, and the Right Team are the major concerns or constraints for small businesses when it comes to adopting technology. If these challenges are solved small and medium businesses can easily adapt and grow as the team is small and agile plus.
In the current scenario, businesses and technology go hand in hand. As technology is continuously evolving. Companies also need to change at a rapid pace to support their client’s needs. Big companies struggle to adapt to change as they have many hurdles like resistance to change, communication gaps due to complex hierarchy systems, and preference for old/legacy systems.
With a dynamic team ready for challenging needs, a lean team structure helps to rapidly adapt which helps to control the project cost and ready-to-use frameworks and utilities which helps to deliver faster SpeckyFox solves these challenges for its customers. SpeckyFox works as a client partner which differentiates us from the other vendors.
What changes have you observed over time in technology adoption by companies?
Technology has been an integral part of business and identified as a key ingredient of growth and economic transformation. Companies are now leveraging the benefits of technology as they understand that it can help to achieve future goals and scale the business quickly. But implementing or adopting new technology is not easy. Any company that has gone through a digital transformation initiative can tell that adoption of new technology at an organization is challenging. With that being said, technology can mark your presence globally. So, accepting and solving such challenges can quickly scale you compared to traditional businesses.
We have already witnessed the startups opting for platforms like whatsapp, shopify, and video conferencing systems which enables them to run the business effectively during covid times. Earlier, the learning used to be on blackboards only but now you can see many unicorns in ed-tech, who are using the tech to rapidly grow their business.
Even manufacturing units have started automating lots of processes. They have started adapting to new technology, to track the machine usage/status and which can be later utilized to visualize the data in reports. As management can understand progress reports and take decisions based on data.
One of the challenges is to have skillful people to work and imparting technical knowledge would be another challenge. What is your opinion on this?
I completely agree with this statement. Every organization runs with a team of skillful people who are willing to make an impact.
India is a growing country. We are seeing investors from the world investing in India.
Outsourcing work to India has become more prominent than ever before.
As a result of this India is in a good spot to take advantage of this opportunity but there is a challenge as well. In the past 1.5 years, the talent shortage in the Indian market has been witnessed.
If we observe the job market on a high level, It can easily be seen in the last couple of years that India is infused with a lot of outsourced work but to cater to this huge demand, the rate of increase of the skilled resources is not at par. And during the pandemic, the Indian IT market is behaving very erratically. If someone is skilled, it is becoming very difficult to impart technical knowledge to fellow team members due to a lot of factors. The mode of training and imparting knowledge is changing a lot. We have seen that everything is moving towards a virtual mode that has its own pros and cons.
To overcome this, companies should focus on training freshers to make them ready to work on the project and skill upgradation of the existing employees rather than only focusing only on hiring talent from the market. The Academic institutes also need to focus on bringing a collaborative approach where the students are trained on theory and affiliated firms can expose them to corporate cultures.
We at SpeckyFox are focusing on both areas. Hiring new talent and training the people. We are not only searching and hiring the talent pool from the market but also believe in identifying the potential of the people and grooming them on the projects and technologies for future use.
Should employees see technology as a threat if companies adopt new technologies and automated ways to get the job done?
Definitely not!
You see the technology industry is growing ever since its existence.
Forget the US or the world’s IT/technology industry. Just pick the Nifty IT Index, which represents India’s top IT companies. This Nifty IT Index grew more than 27,000% from 1996 till today. IT outperformed any sector you compare it with.
And remember these are just top IT companies, we have not counted the startups.
New technologies and new automation processes are definitely not threats but increase employee productivity. One major problem when new technology is introduced is people’s resistance to change. With new technology implementation, there is a learning curve for the existing team. This is where the resistance comes in.
The new changes should be properly communicated and knowledge should be imparted to the existing team members to avoid this resistance. Because at the end
- Learning new technologies would not only help to scale up the company but also gives lifetime learning for employees.
- It helps to eliminate the repeated tasks
- Make the processes smooth and effective which brings satisfaction and positivity in the team
The app that was just mentioned above (that SpeckyFox developed) to track the field engineers had challenges while adopting but within 2 weeks people started to use it once they realized the app makes their tasks easy and smooth.
How do you see startup’s role in contributing to India’s growth and how it can be expedited with the use of the latest technology?
Startups have a huge role in contributing to India’s growth both in terms of technology and business.
As per the minister of state for Commerce and Industry Som Prakash, India registered a whopping rise of 15,400% in the number of startups that rose from 471 in 2016 to 72,993 as on 30th June 2022.
India had 83 unicorns with a total valuation of $277.77 billion, according to the Survey. Most of these unicorns are in the services sector, which contributes over 50% to India’s GDP
India has become the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world after the US and China, the Economic Survey 2021-22 released on Monday showed.
Startups are lean and agile. A startup believes in fail fast and fail forward which gives them great strength to experiment and adapt. And, the technology works as a catalyst for scalability.
Scaling up quickly creates more jobs across all work levels. Indian SaaS companies are expected to create half a million new jobs by 2030, the travel and hospitality industry 52.3 million jobs by 2028 and the FoodTech industry 9 million jobs by 2024.
As internet penetration and usage of handheld devices increase the exposure to tier-3 cities is increasing. The new age businesses with the help of technology are reaching remote customers which are ensuring social parity. Creating means and opportunities for tier-3 cities as well.
What is your goal for 2022?
We are targeting to double our headcount in the current financial year with a focus on targeting Fortune 500 clients and funded start-ups as potential clients. Every year, our revenues are touching new heights with minimal EBITDA. Compared to last year, we are hoping to make our revenues double by bringing new overseas clients to the list.
We are going to boost our sales and marketing budgets by three folds. We have already brought a lot of process automation, tools adoption, HRMS refinement, L&D (Learning & Development) etc.
One of the foremost things that we are trying to achieve this year is to build a strong line of middle management. In parallel, we are also eyeing to open an operational office in places like Indore
We don’t want to compromise on our four values i.e. Trust, Respect, Passion, and Employee Empowerment. Despite the pandemic hiccups, we are pretty much stable, all thanks to the team who really adapts with the core values of SpeckyFox.
