Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.
Kam Desai and Ashish Gambhir know first-hand how hard it can be to engage employees.
Working at an analytics company, Desai and Gambhir found that while they could consistently and accurately collect customer feedback and supply it to their clients, negative scores tended to stagnate. For some reason, the necessary quality changes at the store level weren’t getting made.
“We realized that the issue was transparency,” Desai said. “Although restaurants had the right data, it was never getting to the right employees — the men and women on the front line responsible for making each sale. This stuck out as a huge opportunity to improve efficiency, and ultimately, customer service.”
Desai and Gambhir decided to develop their own software to fill the gaps.
“MomentSnap is unlike anything else in the marketplace,” Gambhir, co-founder and president, said. “The issue with a lot of engagement strategies surrounding performance is that they’re really not very ‘engaging’ — engagement has become just another box to check off by printing out satisfaction scores and sticking them on a wall somewhere.”
That’s where Arlington-based MomentSnap makes the difference. It puts that information directly in employees’ hands, empowering them to take ownership of their performance in a public forum and compete with their peers.
Using the software, employees accrue points for positive guest feedback and completed “missions” that are set by managers, which can range from upselling certain products to watching a video message from the leadership team. Employees then are ranked and recognized on a public leaderboard. A rewards structure also can be offered to employees, allowing them to use their points for prizes.
“MomentSnap spurs action and tangibly increases customer satisfaction — that’s real engagement,” Desai, co-founder and CEO, said.
Other employee engagement programs often are defined by transactions, rather than relationships, Desai said.
“Instead of seeing a percentage on a sheet of paper that correlates to guest satisfaction, we hope to emphasize that each customer interaction is unique — a moment, not a transaction,” he said. “We make snapshots of these moments available to employees in the form of comments and survey results — a moment snap.”
Gambhir said MomentSnap can be catered to any organization in any industry, but the company has started with a focus on the restaurant, hospitality and retail sectors. He said the company is currently tracking about 50,000 employees and seeing “incredible early success.”
So far, MomentSnap has seen a 10 to 20 percent increase in customer satisfaction among workers using the software, Gambhir said. “We’re seeing that employees are checking the app every shift, even though it’s optional — exceptional usage levels,” he added.
MomentSnap landed in Arlington after receiving an investment from CIT GAP Funds, a group of investment funds placing near-equity and equity investments in Virginia-based organizations.