Interview: Mr. Sourabh Deorah, Co – Founder & CEO at Advantage Club, a Global Employee Engagement Platform

Interview with Mr. Sourabh Deorah, Co – Founder & CEO at Advantage Club, a Global Employee Engagement Platform

Sourabh Deorah, CEO, and Co-founder of Advantage Club is a tech-savvy entrepreneur who has revolutionized the employee engagement and financial wellness space. He leads the company in its strategic direction, product development, and overall business success.

With a Master’s degree in Computer Science from UCLA and a background in engineering, Sourabh specialized in machine learning and data mining.

He began his professional journey with Amazon and Microsoft in the US before launching his first entrepreneurial venture, Advantage Club, in 2016, with his partner Smiti Bhatt, also a UCLA alumna.

Today, Advantage Club has a presence in over 60 countries and has partnered with more than 370 corporate companies across the world.

Sourabh’s unique experience in generating scalable product ideas and running large teams has allowed him to redefine the employee engagement world with Advantage Club.

The platform has become a trusted tool for businesses to engage with their clients/employees meaningfully, and for marketers to reach out to their target customer groups quickly.

His unwavering belief in innovation and implementation has earned Advantage Club a strong reputation in the industry.

Sourabh’s vision is to revolutionize the employee benefit segment by going beyond the traditional provident fund and corporate discount policy.

When not leading his team, Sourabh enjoys traveling, seeking adventure, and exploring start-up opportunities.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialisation and the services that your company offers. 

Sourabh Deorah: Advantage Club is a global employee engagement platform driving workplace experience and wellbeing with features like rewards, recognition, perks, flexible benefits and community building on a unified platform.

We offer an end-to-end digital Reward & Recognition platform that allows managers and organisations to acknowledge employees for their efforts, all with the click of a button.

Through the platform, employees can give high-fives, likes, comments and more to show their appreciation for their colleagues.

Our R&R platform is also matched with a global reward redemption marketplace that lets employees to choose from over 10,000+ global brands.

Our Perks & Privileges solution allows organisations to add something special to employees’ earnings by offering unique and exclusive corporate offers and deals across the country.

Through our Flexible Benefits offering, companies can create multiple type of employee wallets curated to specific marketplaces, wellness, work from home, L&D wallets, and more.

Our Community and Fun Zone solution brings multiple employee engagement programs under one platform.

With programs like intra-corporate games with live leaderboards, peer-to-peer marketplaces and hobby clubs, our solution offers something unique for bringing employees of every type of organization together.

Our Financial Wellness solution helps employees become financially savvy by offering facilities to save, get loans and salary advances at affordable prices and zero interest rates.

With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

We envision a world where employees are highly engaged and happy, and every workplace, big or small, has a positive culture of appreciation and recognition.

We help organisations build and run employee experience and engagement programs that resonate with their culture and values. 

We started with an end-to-end reward, recognition, and perks solution to facilitate meaningful employee engagement through exclusive privileges and rewards from our brand partners.

The platform allows organisations to grant rewards and recognition to employees for hard work, major milestones, and manage budgets, nominations, approvals and social feeds.

Over the next few months, we expanded our platform to include other employee engagement offerings such as communities, online game zones, hobby clubs and classifieds. 

We also believe employee benefits should be beyond provident funds, time-offs, and free lunch or game rooms.

Benefits must be more meaningful, valuable, and holistic to employees’ unique needs. With this view in mind, we launched several holistic employee wellbeing offerings, such as the Flexible Benefits solution that allows employees to choose what they want category-wise.

We have also launched financial wellness solutions such as Early Wage Access and the Advantage Card for Tax Saving, which help employees with their financial needs.

We are today one of the most comprehensive platforms offering solutions for all employee engagement & welfare initiatives.

What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

Sourabh Deorah: As a tech-driven organisation, we have bold plans to revolutionise the employee experience and engagement space. We are planning a big move on the metaverse & NFTs that will change how employees experience rewards and recognition initiatives.

We are building solutions that allow for an efficient solution to bring the best of both physical and virtual approaches together.

We have found a product market fit and some early success. We will continue to expand our offering with the ultimate goal of catering to the entire employee lifecycle management.

What is the edge your company has over other players in the industry?

Sourabh Deorah: Our biggest differentiator is that we have an all-encompassing solution in the reward, recognition, perks, and benefits space.

Our clients can launch several programs across the employee lifecycle on a single platform, giving them the flexibility to run programs with the least implementation effort.

We have a highly modular offering relevant to organisations of varied employee sizes and highly customisable to needs.

The other clear edge is that our app and platform experience is the best in the industry, which helps drive employee engagement for our clients.

What’s your growth plans for the next 12 months?

Sourabh Deorah: On the business side, we are looking to expand aggressively in International markets, specifically in North America, the Middle East, and South East Asia.

We will also double down our effort in penetrating deeper into our current market and client base and winning the mandate for all employee lifecycle management needs.

What is the reason that organisations are using IoT/analytics/big data/AI/ML/Big Data Analytics?

Sourabh Deorah: As a tech-driven platform, we are constantly on the go to help organisations customise the platform and find opportunities to make the offering more relevant.

We are using analytics to find early indicators of employee disengagement and help organisations tweak their R&R program or spruce their employee benefits program to cater to unique needs.

We are extensively using ML to map user behaviour patterns on the platform to offer a unique experience basis their past interactions.

From a reporting perspective, we give access to dashboards and numerous analytics to HR managers to help them understand the level of employee engagement and where there might be potential for attrition. 

Where do you see growth coming in for the sector?

Sourabh Deorah: In a world where your location has become irrelevant, the talent market will get fiercer. And this will create intense competition to engage employees in different ways, and consequently, the idea of the benefits will become more prominent.

The future is about creating a great employee experience. All the tenets that have been applied around customer experience over the last decade will come into force for employee experience in the next three to four years.

Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions and clients’ feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company. 

Sourabh Deorah: Our biggest achievement by far is the steady increase in employee retention rate amongst all our clients that have launched our programs.

Many associations and industry bodies have recognised us including NHRD, World HRD Congress, ET HR and BW BusinessWorld.

Still, the most significant award for me has been the fact that we have never lost a client till date, which speaks volumes about the value we add to our customers.

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