Article: How to resolve professional life concerns through real time chats?

Executive Coaching

How to resolve professional life concerns through real time chats?

Swapnil Kamat, founder & CEO of Work Better Training talks about his recently launched app myCoach which is a first-of-its-kind app in India that will help users resolve their professional life concerns through real time chats with subject matter experts.
How to resolve professional life concerns through real time chats?

In his interview, Kamat talks about how important apps like these are for today's tech-savvy generation considering the growing popularity of technology amongst today’s population.

What inspired you to get into mentoring and coaching and what is the whole concept behind it?

Work Better conducts thousands of trainings every year. In each and every training program, the one thing that’s recurrent is participants asking us whom to seek advice/help from while implementing what is taught in the classroom. While participants understand the importance of and the logic behind concepts that are taught in the classroom, it is at the implementation stage that professionals actually need the support of a coach to guide them. That is when we realized the need of the hour is to make executive coaching, up till now exclusive to senior management levels, available to every professional at any time.

Is there a change, in the way companies are approaching leadership development that validates the need for a coach? Is coaching given equal importance like other factors such as leadership and performance?

Organizations have increasingly begun to realize the need to coach and develop all their employees, right from a fresher to a seasoned leader. A person can become a true leader and an effective professional only when coaching is a continuous process and starts early. 

Coaching has traditionally been considered as an expensive affair and has therefore not been given as much importance as leadership and performance development. At Work Better Training, we believe that coaching cannot and should not be restricted only to a certain senior level of professionals but should be available to every employee in the company to aid in their professional growth. This is the reason behind us developing myCoach – a cost-effective app that can be made easily available to every employee in the organization and help provide leadership development & solutions to performance issues as well. 

Could you tell us more about your app myCoach and how does it function?

myCoach is the first of its kind app in the world that will provide you with your very own personalized coach to address your specific self-development needs. Professionals can live chat with dedicated executive coaches and subject matter experts for their daily work-related problems. With their choc-a-bloc work schedules, professionals do not always have the time to attend trainings or speak to their managers for development. myCoach resolves that problem by being available on your smartphone – which means you can chat with a coach anytime, anywhere and get your problems resolved instantly. The app also provides daily inputs based on the science of micro-learning in the form of Tips, Reminds & Motivates. 

What is your monetization strategy for your business, have you received any funding?

The app is available on a nominal B2B subscription per user per month. No, we don’t have any funding for the app yet.

Who are the users of your app in the enterprise space?

Within the first month of the launch of the app, we got Infosys on board as our first client for myCoach. The other clients, some of whom that have come on board and others who are in the pipeline, are one of the Big 4, a global consulting major, and an Indian FMCG. We’ve got some great feedback on the app interface and content as well as the live chat sessions that users have had with our coaches and subject matter experts. Since each chat has a rating and feedback from the user at the end of the chat, we’ve had an average chat rating of 4.5 out of 5 amongst all our users. The sheer volume of daily chats on varied topics is large and the feedback received from end users has been excellent. The feedback we received from the L&D heads of these companies is that their employees have come back to them saying that their sessions with our subject matter experts has had an impact on them and brought about a positive change in their work lives.

The app currently is available for B2B, do you have any plans in making the app available on B2C subscription?

The app currently is available only on a B2B subscription. With the great response that we’ve been receiving from our users, we will be considering a B2C subscription too for the app in the future.

How have you planned in delivering customized training programs Pan India?

Work Better Training has over 237 well-known names in the corporate sphere whom we conduct regular training programs for. We design training programs for all our clients, customizing them to the client’s particular needs. We have conducted thousands of training & team building programs since we started operations in 2008. In the last financial year alone, we have trained over 1 lakh professionals in soft skills & behavior. 

What is your vision for the firm?

Work Better’s vision is to make India a country of effective professionals, helping in the development of the country. Executive training has a direct impact on the social as well as economic fabric of the country. Every time we help develop a person’s skills, it helps them individually, their family, their company and the country as a whole. The more competent professionals become in terms of their soft skills and behavior, it can only have a positive impact on the socio-economic growth of the country. What India needs is a highly productive and skilled workforce, and this is what Work Better is helping create.

Rapid fire

1. If you could time travel and meet your younger self, what advice you would give?

Do more productive things and travel more.

2. If you could snap your fingers and have founded another business, what would it be?

Something in the lifestyle/fashion/design space.

3. Who do you consider are your competitors?

Dale Carnegie, Franklin Covey. 

4. Who is the first person who comes to your mind when you hear the word “successful entrepreneur”?

Steve Jobs & Elon Musk

5. What’s the one and only one thing an Entrepreneur must have in his/her mind?

Growth!

The article has been formulated with inputs from Work Better Training.

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Topics: Executive Coaching, Leadership

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