Mercu meets deskless staff the place they’re

Many worker engagement and retention instruments had been created with the belief that staff spent most of their time at desks. However the majority of the global workforce is deskless, which means that they’re normally on the transfer and don’t have fixed entry to a laptop computer. Plenty of them are additionally dissatisfied with their jobs, which suggests corporations must cope with excessive churn and low retention charges. Primarily based in Singapore, Mercu needs to assist with a platform designed particularly to achieve deskless staff.

Launched in November 2022, Mercu introduced as we speak it has raised $1.6 million in seed funding from 500 World, TEN13, Flying Fox Ventures, Archangel Ventures, XA Community and returning investor Sequoia Capital India.

Mercu is utilized by corporations in retail, logistics, hospitality and manufacturing to onboard staff, talk with them and assist enhance engagement. Its clients embrace Mexican quick meals chain Guzman Y Gomez’s operations in Singapore and Sam Prince Hospitality Group in Australia. It additionally has clients in the US, the place the seed funding will probably be used to broaden Mercu’s footprint and on hiring.

Earlier than launching Mercu, the startup’s two co-founders, Jascha Zittel and Elliott Gibb, each labored at Seize. Zittel, a product supervisor there, wanted to speak with hundreds of thousands of drivers in eight international locations, and located that engagement for messages despatched via WhatsApp and Fb was a lot larger than in-app communications or electronic mail.

The 2 advised TechCrunch that COVID laid the groundwork for Mercu as a result of it highlighted the significance of the deskless workforce, and in addition how little their wants had been being met. Regardless of accounting for greater than 70% of the worldwide workforce, lower than 1% of VC funding will get allotted to startups within the area, they stated.

Whereas working at Seize, Zittel and Gibb, a former product designer on Seize’s passenger expertise group, noticed that many deskless staff really feel disconnected from their corporations, which negatively impacts retention charges. Retaining staff means staying in fixed contact with them and meaning assembly them the place they’re, which is why Mercu works with fashionable messaging apps as an alternative of requiring staff to obtain yet one more one. That is particularly essential in rising markets the place there are {hardware} and information bandwidth restrictions on smartphones.

Mercu can be utilized to create customized content material, or employers can choose from templates for campaigns like engagement surveys. The platform segments staff into teams primarily based on their function, tenure and site, and offers content material creators analytics about learn and completion charges, trade benchmarks and suggestions.

Some examples of what employers use Mercu for embrace group dinner invites, recognition applications, shift swaps and coaching sign-offs. Guzman y Gomez automated their hiring and onboarding course of by utilizing Mercu to carry out duties like sending interview invitations and presents via WhatsApp, which lowered the variety of no-shows to interviews. The quick meals chain additionally makes use of Mercu to gauge employee sentiment on a month-to-month foundation to scale back turnover charges.

Sam Prince Hospitality Group makes use of Mercu to ship steady coaching, together with SOP updates, product data and gross sales coaching.

Mercu’s product improvement group plans to concentrate on extra instruments for workers, together with taking a look at how giant language fashions, like ChatGPT, can be utilized to speak with staff at scale.