Arun Nayyar, MD & CEO at NeoGrowth unravels the learning and innovation programs:
Ravi Lalwani: Every organization has top-down learning programs, where an expert comes and trains the employees. At the same time, employees are learning things, especially when interacting with customers, and many of these learnings can be incorporated into new products, processes, etc. How are you leveraging this at NeoGrowth?
Arun Nayyar: Knowing the customer’s pulse in a dynamic world is not only important to offer relevant products and services to customers, but also forms a crucial part of the overall growth of a professional. NeoGrowth’s deep customer connect provides key insights about India’s MSMEs, which act as valuable tools in upskilling our employees. To ensure a continuous flow of customer insights, we have rolled out various channels of communication with our customers. One of which is the ‘Voice of Customer’ program initiated in 2019 where we gather insights through personal interactions with the front-end employees of in-house customer-facing departments such as sales, renewals, collections, and customer service. Since the front-end customer-facing teams have a detailed understanding of customer requirements, inputs from them help come up with relevant products or new product features.
How is the company collecting this learning and converting it to innovation?
To further encourage our employees, our flagship initiative, ‘Ideathon’, helps us drive a culture of innovation. As part of this initiative, the HR Head and respective the function head jointly conduct workshops with all the employees. The list of ideas generated is shared with the respective department heads to weigh the feasibility of execution.
The selected ideas are closely tracked for closure. To strengthen this practice, since 2017, NeoGrowth has had a dedicated idea-sharing platform ‘NeoIdeas’, a forum for employees to share ideas and for the organization to recognize ‘ideapreneurs’. A wide range of ideas has been incorporated along with the reward and recognition of the originator of ideas. We have often seen that the ideas received from this forum have helped substantiate the findings of industry research, giving us the voice of customer on newer product offerings, and process improvement opportunities with a ‘voice of employee’.
The inputs gathered through such forums are analyzed for feasibility, and product and process improvements get identified for execution. This elaborate approach to drive customer centricity and innovation, which make two of NeoGrowth’s core values, helps us maintain a competitive edge and build a stronger workforce.
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