BenefitsPLUS was conceived in 2010 and has since then, been advising businesses on how to get opportunities, differentiate, manage cash, get into the market, etc. The concept arose out of the fact that even though Internet is being accessed by over 60 percent of employees in companies today, organizations are not really being able to implement their rewards and recognition programs effectively. There are no dedicated departments for this and the HR manager does not get the time to manage various aggregators or the vendors. BenefitsPLUS approached HR managers directly to offer a complete white-labeled page that would look like their own company intranet page, but would offer the employees a wide range of products to choose from. The system would definitely not allow employees to surf the Internet.

Under Benefits Plus, we have Privilege Plus, which purely offers discounts to employees. It is not based on performance or result and can be available purely as an employee benefit. We have over 100 companies now and we manage their total e-commerce and discount engines.

The second program is known as Reward Plus, which is not only about rewards and recognition but also includes sales and distribution channel incentives and loyalty programs.

At some point we realized that the HR managers could want something like a brand shop. That is when the third screen was discovered. This concentrated on making the employees, suppliers and customers build an affinity to the brand of the organization. This program is known as Gift Plus.

Within all these three, we found that customer service was the most important, so today we operate, for example, 3,500 call centere seats and 25 fulfilment centers all across India. We provide a complete 360 degree solution to a company.
India is a substantial market and we were very focused in what we are doing. In order to be the best, we realized that we needed to understand the challenges faced both by the employees and employers.

The vision was to focus on all three aspects, but one would have to focus on one and become the best. So, we realized that we should start with Privilege Plus and then move on to rewards and recognition. If a company has 65,000 employees, what is the most important thing? The first is employee data and the second is intranet. If this company wants its employees not to stay on the internet, but wants them to be there on the intranet, then we have to integrate our engines with theirs by using HTTPS, which has very high-end security firewalls. Once that is done, we integrate the entire employee data onto the engine. Now, with 65,000 data, we have knowledge of the gender, age, location, department, pay, etc. That is sensitive data. An organization will only interact with companies they trust and BenefitsPLUS has fortunately earned that trust. We also have our own data center, which is 5,000 sq. ft. in area.

There are multiple facilities we provide, firstly, there is the e-commerce engine and the technology, secondly there is fulfilment, thirdly we provide the call center and fourthly we offer the hosting of the entire application. That is a very large ecosystem.

As this is a solution that is being sold and not a commodity, organizations need to have the confidence, that we as a company understand their business and challenges. That means recruiting the right people, giving them the right training and making sure we have a highly scalable application.

BenefitsPLUS also owns a company called Koovs.com. The B2C space and B2E space are very common spaces, the engines are the same, and the consumer is the consumer. The point was how we could leverage our capability, performance, and fulfilment centers for both the businesses. Another company under our umbrella is Theprivatesales.com.

The trend of companies looking at rewards and recognition more strongly is definitely happening more because the market place has become more competitive - competitive in hiring the right talent, making sure the product is sold and in terms of customer service. All of that needs an incentive, a reward and recognition. Therefore, there are companies that provide it today, but they provide a fragmented service. What we provide is a complete digital service, which is both online and offline, but can be managed with immediate digital results in real time.