The News: This summer, frontline success solution provider Beekeeper introduced its Frontline Intelligence platform, an AI-driven analytics and dashboarding solution that can measure sentiment and productivity. More information on this solution can be found in this press release.
Beekeeper Introduces Frontline Intelligence Platform
Analyst Take: Beekeeper is a provider of frontline success solutions with headquarters in Zurich. The company recently launched a Frontline Intelligence platform that offers users a view into sentiment and productivity across its frontline workforce. The solution does so without relying on surveying, instead ingesting all the communication data into a proprietary machine learning model to see positive and negative trends.
I recently discussed with Beekeeper CEO Cristian Grossman and Chief Product Officer Kees de Vos the benefits of this new platform and important frontline trends, the nuances of supporting this very different segment of the workforce, and the need to solve the disconnect problem.
Supporting Frontline Workers Needs a Different Approach
Founded in 2012, Beekeeper has customers around the world, but mostly in the US and Europe. The company has employees in more than 130 countries, providing a broad view into how employees work in the frontline around the world. It has a solid customer base of more than 1,200 companies that represent a variety of industries. The majority are in manufacturing, retail, hospitality, construction, and healthcare.
Frontline workers have a completely different set of challenges than desk-based workers, and according to CEO Grossman, the software needed to support them should reflect those differences. Often frontline workers have lower computer literacy and no access to IT systems. Some do not have corporate email addresses and there tends to be high fluctuation in this worker segment. There is also the overlying complexity of labor laws for contract workers and nonemployees.
“The development of solutions for frontline workers needs to focus on meeting their specific challenges and needs,” says Grossman. “Many companies in the segment sometimes feel that if they have an intranet, a document library, or a shift system, and they simply give access to their frontline workers, that it will work out well. But these fragmented solutions often lead to wasted time and frustration as it’s still not really solving frontline issues.”
“There are a range of solutions on the market right now. Beekeeper is offering a solution that integrates well with other systems and is purpose-built to be a one-stop-shop platform that can help solve pain points with process automation, real-time communications and collaboration, and productivity support,” says Grossman.
The Beekeeper platform is mobile-based and covers many touchpoints along a customer journey including onboarding, communications, shift, and task management.
The Importance of Solving Disconnection
“One of the largest problems for frontline workers is the complete disconnect many face from their headquarters, manager, and information systems. This is a very weak link, as the worker basically experiences everything from not understanding what their objectives are, or getting the information they need to do their job, to not even knowing when they must work. There are massive implications of this disconnect, including productivity loss. Not just for the frontline worker, but their frontline manager who is spending an enormous amount on coordination and administrative work,” says Grossman.
Grossman and I discussed the balance between implementing these solutions for productivity reasons versus implementing them for employee experience (EX). “It really needs to be a combination of both. Some of the main reasons that frontline workers leave is because they are overworked, their teams are understaffed, and their current systems are inefficient or difficult to use. Providing frontline workers with supporting technology can ensure that productivity is in balance and workers are engaged, which helps support retention. In addition, offering communication features that enable teams with closer access to management and leadership helps ensure they understand in a timely fashion the biggest picture in the organization. It helps address employees’ needs to feel part of a bigger team, to receive recognition, and to share the stories that make people feel proud of their organization. For Beekeeper, it’s about offering technology-driven features that make workers’ lives easier day to day in very concrete ways and provide the emotional engagement piece, which is critically important to retention and employee satisfaction – it can’t be underestimated.”
Frontline Intelligence Platform
The Frontline Intelligence platform was launched this past summer and offers a way to see employee sentiment and productivity quickly and easily. The platform uses AI-driven sentiment analysis that is fully General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)- and privacy-compliant. It also includes real-time analytics that offer a view into trends and areas for process improvement, in addition to onboarding and activation tools. Organizations can compare their performance against benchmark data from other frontline businesses.
Proactively knowing the shifts in employee sentiment can help with employee engagement and retention and help mitigate corporate risk. According to Beekeeper CPO Kees de Vos, the solution can get a gauge on how employees are feeling without needing to launch a survey.
“Often the traditional way to see how your team is doing is to offer a survey. We can accommodate that as well, but surveys can be intrusive and cumbersome to administer for busy HR leaders. And their insights only reflect one moment in time. As an alternative, we have done a lot of research and worked closely with University of Applied Sciences in Luzern to develop a solution where we can feed in all our communication data into our own proprietary machine learning model. From that, we can simulate how engaged teams are. It can be used to identify issues such as the potential for strike action and unrest, as well as positive trends about what’s going well so that it can potentially be rolled out to other teams within an organization.”
Providing good EX depends on a lot of factors as the employee journey can be a long one, spanning onboarding to offboarding. For frontline workers, who are often not near a headquarters location, it is even more important to ensure that they are receiving the same support and feeling of connection as desktop workers. It is becoming apparent that the best way to do that, just like it is for CX, is to “meet them where they are,” which usually means a mobile device. Employee-supporting technologies will only demonstrate their full capabilities if they have high usage, which means being easy to use, being physically accessible to the frontline worker, and providing benefit by solving the unique problems faced by deskless workers.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
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Microsoft Brings Next-Generation AI To Frontline Workers
4 Strategies to Build Employee Connection for Positive EX and Retention
Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
She brings more than 20 years of experience in technology research and marketing; prior to her current role, she was a Research Analyst at Omdia, authoring market and ecosystem reports on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and User Interface technologies. Sherril was previously Manager of Market Research at Intrado Life and Safety, providing competitive analysis and intelligence, business development support, and analyst relations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
