Hello and welcome to our pre NRF interview with Steve Kramer, CEO and founder of Work Jam Were sat actually lost out. We're stood in the very lovely location just round the corner from NRF Asia. Steve, I forgot before we go, are you actually expiring or are you here as a visitor? We are at Expo, we're speaking at the event, we have a booth at the event and we were really excited to be part of the first NRF in this region. Our fantastic.
Well, listen, without Fergie, why don't we maybe start unpacking a little bit about who you are? How did you become a CEO, founder of Work Jam? Sure. And then we'll focus in on on Work Jam. OK, great. Well, I, I've been in the retail technology business for around 25 years now. So we started our first company in 1999. It was an ecommerce software company called icongo based in Montreal, Canada. I'm, I'm from Montreal. Cool.
And we grew that to become one of the global leaders both in retail ecommerce platforms as well as B2B commerce platforms. We learned that up merging in 2010 with our European competitor called Hybris. So icongo became Hybris. We went on to become the dominant player in the industry for enterprise commerce technology and ultimately landed up exiting test AP in 2013. OK, so I stayed on at SAP for two years, loved it. SAP is a phenomenal
organisation. And, you know, after two years, I wanted to get back to something entrepreneurial. I missed being, you know, close to customers. I wasn't in that role anymore and building something. I couldn't do anything in ecommerce as a result of some non non competes that I had. So I started looking into what else was keeping executives up at night.
And as I spoke to a lot of retail executives, you know, people in the manufacturing distribution areas and so forth, I found that the workforce actually, this was like in 2014 was a, was something that was causing a lot of anxiety. And you had millennials just starting to come into the workforce. Yeah. And people were were worried about that, how we gonna
communicate with millennials. They're very different from, you know, from the traditional worker in the US You had President Obama that was starting to take notice around the social economic issues, around unfair scheduling practises for hourly workers. Yeah. So I noticed this. It was a it was an interesting time where there was a really a transformation that was needed around how organisations were communicating and managing with
their frontline staff. Yeah. And, and as a result, we, we took the concepts of e-commerce and really applied it to workforce management to create a experiential platform, a transactional platform for frontline workers where a large organisation would be able to better manage their hourly staff, their non desk workers and and drive better results in their business. No. Well, fantastic. So you definitely have the entrepreneurial bug.
You can't as as much as you try and work in the corporate world, it's durable, but not where where your heart is. So I mean, tell me something like what are the problems that when you're you must meet so many retailers and I'm sure you can meet a bunch of retailers here. What's the thing that they come for you to solve? They're, they're, they're solving business problems. They they're driving, they're trying to achieve operational efficiencies, they're trying to cut cost.
That comes in the forms of either task management, where they have use cases around compliance in the field that they're trying to solve. They are predominantly right now also trying to communicate better with the field. That that was a factor that was like an impact effect of COVID. Yeah, right. Like when COVID happened, there were very few tools out there to be able to communicate with the frontline. On processes. And that's. Right.
They didn't have a process to actually talk to the frontline area managers maybe. Yeah, they had E-mail Manager might. Put yeah, because they had e-mail addresses, right. But frontline employees, they don't have e-mail. They don't have the tools that we have his desk workers. So it's operational efficiency, it's communication, it's learning comes in those forms. Flexible scheduling is another area where they're coming to us
around solving business issues. Ultimately, as we get into conversations with prospects, we start unfolding other issues that are happening in the organisation. And you know, the frontline is a underserved market right now. 75% of companies have not invested in and their frontline work tech and, and, and when they have, they've landed up with a a disparate group of applications that a frontline
employee needs to use. So on average, we did a study a couple years ago with Forrester Research. On average, companies around the world have 4:00 to 5:00 apps that are frontline employee needs to use in order to do their job. Wow. And we've seen it up to 8 or 9 in some cases. And it's hard enough being a frontline employee. Imagine having to use so many applications on the floor of a plant or an addition, you know, a distribution centre and a retail environment to do your job.
So consolidation of apps simplicity is a is a very big focus that we are seeing as well in the industry, right. Now that's fantastic. I mean, as I said, how do you find, do you get in terms of your, do you get to spend time with the store associates or the store managers as part? We do, yeah. We'd love to visit stores, we love to hear about, you know, what is important to them. The reality is, is that the hourly workers know so much
about the business. They know about the problems, they have ideas on how to solve them. So being able to speak to the hourly associates and our prospects or our customers is a is important to us to start, you know, to continue to innovate in our product to build these operational tools, but also to help organisations figure out the digital transformation that needs to drive these efficiencies that they're looking.
For and do you think retailers in terms of the outcomes can sort of focus in on some of the like real world examples where something that surprised you that you know, when we, one of your customers, you, you you saw went in to do one thing and you you came out with something. Else, I mean, one of our customers, JCPenney and in the US, they're large big box retailer, discount retailers, around 70,000 employees.
The project that we've started with them was really around flexible scheduling and being able to have an open shift workplace where employees are, they get their core schedule, but they can pick up an extra shift, they can work at a different location than than their primary location. We coupled that with communication tools and that those communication tools had a profound impact on the culture of JCPenney. Yeah, but also the level of engagement and loyalty to the organisation.
I think it was. I think the impact was much wider actually than JCPenney ever anticipated as well. So in addition to labour optimization through flexible scheduling, JCPenney actually had almost a 10% reduction in attrition. Wow, that's a big number. You know, like in retail, on average in in many markets that cost anywhere between 4:00 to $5000 to recruit and train a new employee. Yeah, if you can reduce your your turnover by that those types of numbers.
A significant amount. Millions of dollars that scale the number of referrals that they began to have from employees telling other other friends or colleagues that they should join JCPenney tripled. Ohh wow. And an environment where there's still a labour shortage. It's very difficult to find skilled workers. That's very important. So we see a lot of these things where they're solving one business issue. But when you give the voice to the employee and they feel, you
know, part of the culture. Yeah and they feel like they understand the head offices goals has a big impact on on the business and and on those employees lives. Yeah, absolutely couldn't agree. And I I think, you know, Target used to talk about the number of devices that their colleagues or team members Adam belts, yes, you know, they have the walkie talkies, they had the the handles. So just to focus in a little bit on the tech you what what device
you see on your agnostic? It's it could be bring bring your own device. So a lot of our customers. Have Android enable. Yeah, yeah. Android, Apple responsive on on web as well for both mobile and desktop use. We often sit on shared devices in the stores as well. There we have a kiosk version of Work Jam as well that is kind of always on for our location. And so there's a lot of deployment optionality. We're also able to sit inside of other collaboration tools.
So if you're using, you know, Teams as an example or your managers are in sales force, we can actually bring Work Jam to those users rather than bringing the users to Work Jam and having another app that they need to use. And many of our customers tend to deploy in a hybrid model where corporate might be using Teams for their desk workers, which could go down to, let's say, manager level. Yeah, managers will use work Jam inside of Teams, but the field is using work Jam native. OK.
Yeah, I think and I think that the the focus has to be for success on the experience. Yeah. Yeah, final two questions. In terms of obviously you, you hold the company. The company is 9 years. Old, so nine years old and you specifically just focus in on scheduling communication. I'm just curious, are you would you move into other areas like can't you do task management or we? Do yeah, we have 5 main pillars. So the five main pillars are we have two way communication, head
of communications. Here is that voice text. That's everything from social network within the app to messaging, chat channels, OK digital doorways into other applications in the organisation. We so so two way communication is pillar number one. We do task management that goes well beyond just traditional task that goes into audit capability and and also being able to integrate with other applications for for task
completion schedule management. So we tend to sit on top of core workforce management applications to expose self-service capabilities and open shift marketplace capabilities and then learning and lastly as earned wage access. So it is a modular system. Many of our customers will start their digital transformation with let's say one or two modules. Yeah. And then they tend to grow into the rest of the application. This is quite comprehensive.
The final question in terms of when you look to the future, not only where you want to be, but in terms of the future of the store associate, how do you see that you have a a vision like what how how you see an empowered because I've saw see that's where you're about empowering the frontline. I'm just curious what how you see the future.
Of well, I, I think that First off, I don't think AI is going to replace the frontline worker, but I believe that AI will have a profound impact on how organisations operate and how the data that is being collected and the actionable insights that come out of AI can really elevate an organisation to the next level. Is for us as an organisation, we're investing a lot in, in AI. We're constantly investing in
the experience. I think the experience is what drives the type of adoption that we're seeing in our customers, which is typically around 80% daily active usage of the app. No, why? That's kind of like blowout numbers compared to an intranet, which is 20 and 25%. And for us as an organisation, we're going global. So we are a Canadian based organisation. We have many customers, large customers in the US, in Australia, in the UK. Southeast Asia for us is a a new
market that we're opening. We already have some large customers here. But you know, we feel as though the problems that we're solving, they're not regional. These are global issues. Yeah. In Singapore, where we are today, the retailers that we're speaking to have the same problems as the companies in New York and London, in Melbourne. It's a human. Problem. It's a human problem.
Exactly. OK, so more humanistic there's I mean, we're going to go for a complete into but coming back from Shanghai and what what I learned there was it doesn't matter what technology can do, you're still gonna end up with human problems. Well, listen, it's been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for allowing giving giving up some time before. That's great view here. Yeah, thank you. Hopefully I'll see you at the show.