Currently present in 7 large cities including New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai, Wassup plans to expand further before a planned IPO in 2019. Taj Vivanta, the Radisson, the Indian Navy are some of its more illustrious clients in the B2B space but the enterprise’s real value lies in how it makes life simpler for couples who are working or people who just don’t have time for the mundane task of laundry. Wassup Laundry was second runners up at the Retail Startup Awards 2017 held this year in Mumbai, & they have been in the news for acquiring a Mumbai-based home laundry service in an equity swap.

In conversation with GlobalLinker (GL) Balachandar R (BR) shares the story of Wassup Laundry and his plans for the company.

GL: Tell us about your business.

BR: After spending over 15 years in the retail industry with various companies such as Hidesign, Tata International, I wanted to start something unique of my own. While doing background research on potential business ideas, I noticed a huge gap in the organised laundry segment. I then decided to work on creating a national laundry brand which brings convenience & quality service to the doorstep. Laundry is an essential necessity of daily urban life, and residents, especially in metro cities, find it challenging to take care of this themselves. There are hardly any professional companies present in this sector. Taking this use case for the urban market, I developed a business model providing laundry service delivered to the doorstep. I held discussions with Durga Das, who was first an investor in our venture, and later came on board as co-founder who also helped me fine-tune my business plan. We launched Wassup in 2011 as an integrated omni-channel player with a processing facility & retail shops where people can drop off their clothes for washing and a mobile app through which an order can be placed along with a 24-hour toll free helpline number. Customers can avail laundry, dry cleaning & shoe/bag refurbishment services through our platform.

GL: What are the challenges you have faced in establishing your business?

BR: Managing unit economics in the laundry segment is extremely hard as there is a logistics component attached to it. Apart from that, the industry backend for laundry services is quite underdeveloped. Aggregating the service via outsourcing partners is very difficult. It is also difficult to attract skilled labour and bring the consistency to ensure customer satisfaction. We decided to set up our own backend facility to keep a check on quality. Manual involvement is involved at various stages in the service process, and to ensure a higher accountability of procedures and quality issues, we built an in-house laundry management software.

GL: What is the USP of your business?

BR: Wassup is India’s only omni-channel player in the laundry segment. It operates via multiple channels such as a website, mobile app (Play Store & Apple store) & a toll free helpline number through which customers can place pickup requests for their laundry right from their doorstep. Apart from these channels, we also have collection stores where customers can physically drop off & collect their clothes after laundering. We are a full stack model with backend processing facilities in each city along with a front end technology platform for customers and a POS system provided at each store for easy order tracking and management.

GL: What are some of the milestones of your business?

BR: Founded in 2011 in Chennai, Wassup has expanded its user base across 7 cities in the form of franchisee stores & collection points and at current has around 40 stores across India. We have serviced over 3 lakh clients and washed over 50 million pieces in the last 5 years. We have a mix of B2C customers & corporate B2B customers we are also servicing hotels, hospitals, spas, salons etc. Currently, we have expanded to 7 major metro cities in India, and are processing around 75,000 pieces of garments on a daily basis at our facilities. We are targeting to be a Rs 500 crore company in the next 4 years.

This year we were voted the third best retail startup at the Retail Startup Awards at the Retail Leadership Summit in Mumbai presented by the Future Group.

GL: What role do you feel GlobalLinker plays in connecting and assisting SMEs?

BR: GlobalLinker’s large network of entrepreneurs, corporates & investors across the globe can help us expand our knowledge base and also seek opportunities beyond our current geography. We feel there is a lot to learn through the experience and problems faced by entrepreneurs across various verticals of SME businesses and help us build a solid business strategy for the global market.

GL: What is your big business dream?

BR: I want to grow Wassup into a company with a Rs 500 crore turnover by the end of 2020 and launch the first IPO in the laundry sector. We want to diversify the brand into multiple affiliate products & services which are co-related to our primary business offering. We believe with a target market of over Rs 2 lakh crores, we want to go public by the year 2019 through an initial public offering (IPO).

GL: What is your message to aspiring entrepreneurs?

BR: My message to aspiring entrepreneurs is that, first, start a business for the right reason. Second, focus on value creation and valuation. Third, persevere with your passion – it takes many sleepless nights to become an overnight success.

The shopper journey is an expanding collection of potential decision points, at any of which a shopper could make a final choice about what they will buy

The challenge of integrating different elements of marketing activity is consistently listed by CMOs as one of their biggest concerns. Nowhere is the challenge greater than in bringing brand and shopper marketing together. Brand and shopper marketing have traditionally existed in silos, with their own techniques, forms of knowledge, objectives and KPIs.  For a long time, this disconnect didn’t seem to matter. Now, though, the balance is shifting — and the requirement to connect brand and shopper marketing is becoming increasingly urgent.
We compiled data from over 30 studies to provide a unique view of how shopper behaviour is evolving – and how more meaningful integration between brand and shopper marketing can address the needs of a fluid and connected shopper. In particular, we’ve identified four changes to shopper marketing research that can set any brand on the way to a more effective, integrated approach.

1. Take brand equity more seriously in shopper marketing research

Shopper marketers are trained to think in terms of missions and occasions as the primary drivers of shopping behaviour. In doing so, they are overlooking what our research confirms as the dominant driver of purchase decisions: brand equity.

In our recent work, we compared the brand equity of 7,400 shoppers across seven different categories and related this to the purchase decisions they made. The correlation between equity and brands purchased was above 0.8.

It doesn’t help that when studies do try to capture the role of brands, they do so using different metrics — and by asking different questions — to brand marketing. Most research will ask what brands shoppers considered — but they won’t explore why they considered them, which brands they have a relationship with or how they feel about them. If we want to integrate shopper marketing more effectively with brand, we need to start measuring brand equity in the same way – and start building models and KPIs around it.

2. Forget the path, focus on the decision point

The concept of a path to purchase, where each individual goes through the same set of stages, is a misleading one, and marketing strategies built around it are increasingly out of touch with how purchase decisions are made.

In reality, the shopper journey is an expanding collection of potential decision points, at any of which she could make a final choice about what she will buy. Around 60-80% of brand decisions are actually made before a shopper has even reached the shelf, and increasing numbers of purchases are being made online, without her ever setting foot in a store.

The role of shopper marketing is to convert shoppers — and this needs to take place whenever and wherever shopper behaviour shows that point of conversion to be. By focusing on the decision point for a given category or product, we can direct limited marketing and media budgets to where they will actually make a difference to shopper choices. This may well involve shopper marketers sharing touchpoints (and occupying the same media channels) as brand marketers.

The focus of integrated strategies should be less about dividing up the media environment between brand and shopper; more about establishing a coherent approach to sharing those channels for a multitude of marketing objectives.

3. Discriminate between touchpoints

It’s tempting for researchers to give equal weight to any touchpoint that a shopper interacts with — or alternatively, to ascribe greater influence to those that occur just before a purchase. This variation of the ‘last click’ distortion comes about because of the difficulties shopper marketing has in differentiating between the roles touchpoints play. Just because a shopper interacts with a touchpoint doesn’t mean that it exerts any influence over him or her. In addition, asking shoppers to recall retrospectively which touchpoints had the greatest influence on a particular purchase is problematic.

You cannot hope to understand the influence of touchpoints on a brand purchase without understanding the relationship that the shopper has with the brand to start with. By building the brand relationship into touchpoint impact models, you can get a truer picture of the moments that really make a difference to purchase decisions.

You can then align these models to the gaps and interruptions that exist within the shopper journey for the brand and reveal those exerting the greatest influence. And when you build models of shopper behaviour on this basis, you have a far more robust means of deciding where to target your investment.

Across the studies we have done, we have consistently found touchpoints that punch 3-4 times above their weight when compared to reach alone.

When trying to understand why you have lower sales in a particular store or on a specific occasion, understanding the relationship between equity and conversion will allow you to identify whether you have a brand building task or a shopper conversion task to undertake

4. Identify the barriers for shoppers who have equity for you already

Barrier studies are one of the traditional mainstays of shopper marketing research. However, from a brand equity perspective, it’s clear that not all barriers are equally worth studying. There is little point interrogating shoppers on why they didn’t buy your products on a particular mission or occasion, if your lack of any brand relationship with them means you did not even enter their consciousness.

When trying to understand why you have lower sales in a particular store or on a specific occasion, understanding the relationship between equity and conversion will allow you to identify whether you have a brand building task or a shopper conversion task to undertake.
When you know the barriers you need to overcome, linking this to the most motivating shopper needs that exist in your category will ensure the messaging you design to overcome the barriers will hit the mark.

As a further build, it is also critical to understand the mind set of the shopper you want to target – are you looking to influence shoppers when they are buying on routine or when they are genuinely exploring the category? While the latter may be less frequent, it can also be the time when shoppers are most open to influence.

Integrated is the way forward

It’s impossible to design a truly integrated approach to brand and shopper marketing without data and insights that embody the connected nature of the shopper. When decisions can increasingly take place in any environment and at any stage, it’s vitally important to identify the most influential points for spending your marketing budget. And you can only do that by understanding your audience as both consumers and shoppers.

Asking brand and shopper marketing teams to work together more closely won’t usually be enough to make that happen. But giving them a common understanding of those with the potential to buy your products will.

Initially, HR management was seen largely as a support function, with major focus on hiring and managing the exit of an employee. As businesses evolved, so did the role of HR.

Today, HR is a business partner and a key function in building an organisation. In addition to taking care of on-boarding and exit formalities, HR is also tasked with the responsibilities of attracting and retaining talent, as well as nurturing employee growth within the organization. There is a paradigm shift from the old practices that are fast becoming redundant. Particularly in the QSR space, newer and more convenient procedures that aid an organization’s goals are displacing some old HR concepts. Here’s a list of HR practices that are fast becoming extinct or are in the process of being so:

1. Recruitment on the basis of quantity

The QSR space is burgeoning and as more players enter this space, the demand for competent and quality professionals keeps growing. Companies begin to struggle with a high attrition rate, even after bulk recruitments. Hence, a lot of focus is being given to employee training and development, counsel and guidance facilities as well as other HR initiatives aimed at keeping employees satisfied and committed to the organization.

In the present scenario, it is considered ideal that an organization create an internal talent pool to tap for ideas, new initiatives or responsibilities through training. This empowers employees to participate in growth opportunities within the organization. At McDonald’s, we prioritise existing employees for non-specialised openings across operations. Our current Vice President of Business Operations across McDonald’s restaurants in West & South India, Ranjit Paliath, is a fine example. He had joined the McDonald’s family in March 1995 as Trainee Manager at its first restaurant in Bandra.

2. Centralization of leadership

The Retail and QSR segment is a major employer of youth, including first time job seekers. It is important for HR professionals to groom talent – taking on young people and developing them into leaders through training programmes and relevant work experience. The rising employee turnover rate is making it essential to develop programs that allow for employee growth within the organization and train them to assume senior leadership positions in order to create smooth transitioning of functions.

3. One-way Communication Channel

Today, it is critical for organizations to have a two-way communication channel with its employees. This exercise not only provides a transparent platform for both the parties but also educates employees on the organisational goals while keeping the organization informed about an employee’s strengths and weaknesses. An HR professional must understand an employee’s perspective and customize talent management exercise on the basis of organization objectives as well as employee needs and expectation.

There is a paradigm shift from the old practices that are fast becoming redundant. Newer and more convenient procedures that aid an organization’s goals are displacing some old HR concepts

4. Excessive dependence on Face-to-Face meetings & Briefings

The trend of daily meetings has reduced as employees tend to be stuck in longer meetings leading to non-productivity. New concepts like e-learning and online communication facilitates flexibility and is a refreshing approach to exchange ideas and even training, compared to face-to-face modules. McDonald’s was the first QSR in the industry to take e-learning to the work floor.

Archaic practices have given way to new techniques that have helped organizations align their business goals with HR practices. HR professionals must never allow processes to become the culture of an organization. They must always strive to create an environment that is accepting and open to employee advice and opinion.

5. Intense focus on operations & processes

An HR professional must understand that processes are supposed to help organizations grow and improve efficacy for new hires and existing employees among other things. These processes must not be a hurdle to an employee’s growth but must be an enabler.

Today, employees think beyond monetary compensation and the HR needs to be mindful of the fact that an employee performs better if the work environment encourages a healthy work-life balance. It is important to have an understanding of work pressures and requirements in the organization and design competent training programs to optimise talent and make work enjoyable. Technology goes a long way in ensuring that processes are smooth and hassle free.
At McDonald’s, we have introduced GATE, a software that standardizes the talent life-cycle management, assessment, performance reviews, succession plans and mobility management. Recently, we also introduced ADEPT-15, a personality assessment tool that helps us analyse an employee’s strengths and weaknesses. To make it more employee friendly, the system is available in local languages so that no information is lost in translation.

The way forward

Archaic practices have given way to new techniques that have helped organizations align their business goals with HR practices. HR professionals must never allow processes to become the culture of an organization. They must always strive to create an environment that is accepting and open to employee advice and opinion. It is critical for talent leaders in organisations to keep pace with employee expectations and needs, creating a workforce that exudes productivity and performance. And an environment that not only facilitates learning but also makes work fun, flexible and creates sustainable futures for both the employees and the organisation.

Over the past years, HR had a mandate of maintaining firm control over the workforce; provide low-cost, convenient administrative HR services; and promote fairness through equal treatment of employees. In the future, the mandate will be to understand and serve employees with highly appropriate offerings that improve their commitment, enthusiasm, preservation and performance.

In a milieu, where our lives are ruled by myriad digital screens — mobile, tablet, laptop, TV, cinema — each telling us how to communicate, shop and behave; and where our business processes are getting more automated, we might just be forgiven to think if we even need people in our organisations any more. At the same time, the need for human ingenuity and intelligence to design the final outcomes on these interaction mechanisms as well as the need for emotional connect in an increasingly impersonal environment around us cannot be more emphasised.

Get ready for a quantum shift

Retail as an industry is at a crossroads today. Existing business models are being challenged as businesses evolve at a much rapid rate than ever before. The new wave of creating business models around shopping on the internet is creating a demand for skills, not known earlier.

As it is, retail demands a baffling variety of skills — ranging from business managers to fashion designers to project managers to customer service associates (It’s enough to befuddle the ordinary HR manager). Add to it, the demands placed by technology experts and analytics champions, which have just gone to further confound an HR professional’s problem. Customers, whether online or in brick-and-mortar stores, are evolving and are demanding more not only in terms of better products and services but also in terms of their shopping experiences. The demands on HR, therefore, are not only in terms of harnessing the right functional skills but also in terms of creating right attitudes and building a customer-centric, performance-focussed, empathetic organisation culture.

However, the truism that ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’ still holds. In these times, HR professionals have a greater need to go back to the basics. There is an increasing need for HR to connect better with business. A CHRO, who is not in sync with his CEO in crystal gazing on what is going to happen to the business in the next few years, simply belongs to the dinosaur age. Sound knowledge of business levers, and the key triggers which could impact the way business is done, is now more essential than earlier. Understanding this would lead to forecasts on the skills and competencies required in the future. An understanding of, and a call on, how technological advances would impact business processes would determine the need and quantum for human interventions. A good HR manager, should therefore, be ready for a substantive shift in the quantum and nature of people in the organisation.

6 must-have HR skills

1. A sound knowledge of business levers, and the key triggers that could impact business
2. An understanding of how technological advances would impact business processes
3. An ability to deal with people from varied and disparate backgrounds
4. Knowledge of the science of sociology and neuroscience in addition to human resources
5. A knack for maintaining an emotional connect with people
6. Awareness of newer and efficient solutions available for handling HR processes

Update your skill sets

It is expected of HR to keep the workforce engaged and aligned with the organisation’s business goals. With people from increasingly varied and disparate backgrounds present in the organisation, and each employee community demanding different ways of motivation, an intelligent HR professional should be well-versed of such a requirement, and means to deliver on them. A cookie-cutter approach having standard operating processes on ‘engagement activities’ will not work now. Like a good marketer, a sound HR professional needs to now segment the workforce.

Increasingly, new performance management and appraisal processes and workplace practices will need to be adopted. Performance appraisal processes and workplace practices that evolved during the manufacturing era are still prevalent today. Instead of vociferously and erroneously backing them, it will serve HR professionals well to appreciate the great way in which the society around has transformed with newer mechanisms of ensuring adherence to business goals. Peer evaluations, social media and community recognitions perhaps are now more potent than plain monetary incentives. They need to reflect on whether some of the rules governing time and attendance need to be questioned in an environment that provides flexibility of working anytime from anywhere.

With rapidly changing technology and an increasingly young workforce, the HR manager is going to be subjected to managing the aspirations of the youth on the one hand, and handling the challenge of reskilling the older generation on the other. That is because even as younger people join an organisation, longer life-span and rising costs are forcing people to continue working for longer than earlier. Increasingly, the HR professional needs to identify the source of these social tensions and be adept at resolving them. Right skilling of the younger people joining the workforce to enhance productivity is also key.

Use technology

We, in HR, will be doing our businesses a great disservice if we do not adopt technology in our processes. Identifying the right talent for the right roles, making the talent productive, and keeping them motivated remain age old problems for HR. However, newer tools are available to us to deliver better on these tasks. From talent sourcing, acquisition and life cycle management to exit management, newer and efficient solutions are available today, and are emerging by the day.

HR managers need new skills to help organisations achieve its business goals

Ignoring the potential of new tools is dangerous because it will lead to a rapid obsolescence of what we, as professionals, bring to the table. Increasing use of analytics and big data, even in HR, is of paramount importance. The behaviour of people in our organisations, if it can be measured and analysed, can throw up key messages on how to keep them happy.
A good HR manager now needs to be more aware of the science of sociology, neuroscience and perhaps anthropology too, and not only be limited to the science of Human Resource Management. The challenge for maintaining an emotional connect with people is greater than ever before. Unless HR professionals raise their empathy quotient manifold, organisations are at a risk of creating an army of mercenary automatons.
Newer challenges bring newer opportunities and a chance to learn things afresh and explore the limits of our own abilities. Today, we are afforded this chance, to renew ourselves and to be better human managers.  Let’s grab this opportunity with both hands.

1. Customer Silos: Customer silos and lack of holistic visibility into customer database across channels make it difficult for retailers to understand and analyse customer data to offer contextual messaging and personalized experience. Being customer-centric is critical in today’s marketplace. Thereby, requiring retailers to know their customers and interact seamlessly with them across touch points based on their preferences.

However, the siloed and non-integrated customer data results in multiple copies of customer profiles, thus limiting retailers’ ability to understand customer behaviour and purchase patterns and offer context-based consistent customer experience.

2. Legacy System Silos: The silos within the legacy IT systems make it significantly challenging and complex to manage inventories across channels. Lack of clear visibility into inventory reduces inventory accuracy, frequently resulting in out-of-stock scenarios in one channel and surplus inventory in another channel. This not only negatively impacts inventory-to-sales ratio but also results in increased inventory costs.

These challenges limit the ability of retailers to identify, track, and manage inventory, ensure order fulfilment of their customers, and optimize supply chain across channels.

3. Organizational Silos: One of the primary challenges in adopting Omni-Channel strategy is siloed organizational teams working independently for e-Commerce and store channels in an organization. This makes it difficult to optimize cross-channel inventories, enhance operational efficiencies, and integrate multiple channels of businesses. According to a survey conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit, 27% of retail executives responded that organizational silos restrict their ability to offer seamless customer experience2.

The siloed teams not only limit collaboration, but also make it difficult to enable process innovation which is imperative for adopting Omni-Channel strategy.

The Building Blocks for adopting omni-channel retailing strategy

The omni-channel consumer expects consistent brand experience across channels and easy access to information at any given point of time. Technologies such as retail store analytics, beacons, and store fulfilment programs are rapidly transforming how retail stores operate and engage with customers. Therefore, retailers’ ability to leverage advanced technology is central to creating a compelling experience and delighting its shoppers.

It is imperative that retailers are equipped in numerous ways to connect with shoppers in real time. The following digital strategies are must-haves for the retailers who are looking to set the ball rolling for Omni-Channel retailing and staying ahead of the curve.

1. Seamless, consistent, and personalized experience across channels

With customers increasingly getting used to shopping across various touch points, they expect consistent experience across channels such as store, online, and mobiles. The only way retailers can reach out to customers is by blurring lines between online and physical stores. According to a survey by Forbes, 44% of respondents prefer to buy online and collect in-store in the US3. To keep up with evolving customer expectations, even the leading online retailers such as Amazon and eBay are partnering with retailers to offer “click-and-collect” services.

The key to engaging customers and gaining loyalty is to understand and enhance their experience continuously across channels. This requires integration of various data streams such as transaction history, website interactions, social conversations, and others, to enable data analysis and insight generation into customer behaviour. Leveraging customer analytics and location-based marketing is the key to offer personalized, relevant, timely messaging, and consistent in-store and online experiences. Location-based marketing is rapidly becoming mainstream, empowering marketers to connect with their customers with contextual messages, in the right place at the right time-thereby, enabling retailers to discover the potential of precise digital marketing strategies. This technology helps take advantage of geo-fencing that allows retailers to track the shoppers’ location, and offer compelling, highly-relevant deals to enhance footfalls to the store. Combining location with customer-buying behaviour and profile, social interaction, and shopping habits can go a long way in enabling retailers to offer relevant and focused deals, and enhance engagement and brand image. According to a Forbes article, location-based services revenue is estimated to reach $43.3 billion by 2019, a growth of about $12.2 billion from 2014.⁴

Another important strategy to entice customers and ensure stickiness is deploying omni-channel loyalty. Unlike conventional loyalty programs, this requires optimizing cross-channel marketing to drive cumulative loyalty outcomes. In order to be successful, retailers need to run ongoing campaigns that interact with and engage the customers across touch points. The key lies in ensuring non-intrusive, intuitive, personalized, and engaging deals offered in real time across customers’ preferred channels.

2. Single view of the customer across channels

Putting the customer at the heart of the business is crucial for retailers to offer seamless, personalized, and consistent experience across channels. To provide Omni-Channel experience, brands need to have a 360 degree view of their shoppers’ attributes, wants, and desires, across multiple channels. A holistic visibility into preferences, purchase history, shopping habits, and demographics can empower retailers to design and create consistent and unique retail experience for their consumers.

3. Inventory visibility across channels

Integrated inventory visibility is another critical factor in providing Omni-Channel experience. Cross-channel supply chain optimization reduces the possibility of out-of-stock situations. To adapt to the evolving market dynamics, retailers need to respond to the customer demands and standardize their inventory across channels. This can be done by deploying technology solutions that can provide comprehensive visibility into the inventory, allocate and replenish forecast inventory and plan order, and ensure fulfilment effectively across channels.

4. Optimized cross-channel order management

In-store pickup of online purchases is increasingly becoming popular amongst shoppers. This gives them the convenience of shopping online without having to pay high shipping cost or waiting for the product to be delivered. In fact, buy online and pick up in-store. Buy Online Pick-up in-Store (BOPS) is one such strategy which is a win-win for both consumers and retailers alike. Shoppers have the convenience to pick up their purchase from a store of their choice as per their schedule, whereas for brick-and-mortar retailers, this strategy provides a significant competitive edge over pure-play online retailers.

5. Seamless order fulfilment

Earlier, supply chain was considered to be a cost centre built only to deliver goods to stores. However, in an Omni-Channel marketplace, the supply chain has taken a centre stage and is one of the key factors that contribute to the shoppers’ experience. According to a Forrester report, 71% of Omni-Channel customers expect to view in-store inventory online, while 50% of them wish to BOPS. If the order fulfilment across any channel goes wrong, it can lead to consumer dissatisfaction and attrition. It is therefore critical to ensure seamless order fulfilment across channels. Retailers need to have complete visibility into order management to ensure on-time store pickup and deliveries. Comprehensive visibility can also help retailers optimize route planning for home deliveries and 3rd-party delivery locations.