Engagement pioneer Xoxoday seamlessly collaborates with partners

“One of the best advantages of Slack Connect is that it’s completely transparent. I don’t need to educate my team on specific topics or trends because they’re already privy to that information in the channel.”

Srivatsan Mohan Chief Technology Officer, Xoxoday

Happy employees lead to a healthy company culture—and employee happiness often hinges on engagement within the workplace. Knowing this, the four founders of Xoxoday set out to motivate and engage employees by fusing technology with India’s penchant for gifting.

Today, the award-winning technology platform develops scalable rewards programs that lower attrition, increase sales performance and lead to better business ROIs. From Nielsen to H&M to Shell, over 1,500 clients in 75 countries use Xoxoday to offer more than 21,000 reward options to 2 million end users. Bringing simplicity to a complex challenge, the company was named “Best Tech HR platform” by People Matters, in the “Top 50 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies” by Deloitte and among the “Top 10 SaaS Start-Ups” by Oracle.

With engagement technology at the center of its business strategy, Xoxoday’s success is contingent on successful relationships with external partners—but traditional communication methods weren’t cutting it. “We work with a lot of freelancers and third-party partners, and couldn’t easily connect in email,” says Srivatsan Mohan, Xoxoday’s chief technology officer.

To transform how his teams worked externally, Mohan implemented Slack Connect, leveraging channel-based messaging to streamline collaboration and provide a secure ecosystem from which to share files, messages and more. “We have a lot of information security policies at the organisation level, so we started using Slack Connect to seamlessly communicate with people outside our teams,” says Mohan.

“Our engineering and partnerships teams wanted Slack. It’s our tool of choice, and we’re very passionate about it.”

Srivatsan MohanChief Technology Officer

Breaking down silos to enable transparency and accountability

By moving partners out of email silos and into Slack Connect workspaces and channels, Xoxoday’s teams can now work securely on new campaigns and strategies, easily share updates and news, and build stronger relationships. “The way we’re able to integrate Slack channels with teams and applications is extremely convenient,” Mohan says.

Within their network of external partners, access to Slack’s extensive app library brings the power of automation to every stakeholder. “Integrations within Slack Connect are a really important benefit,” says Mohan. The engineering team relies heavily on PagerDuty and Jira apps, piping alerts directly into relevant channels. “It was impossible before, but now Slack provides an ecosystem of applications. I love having my tools centralized and integrated in Slack.”

Internally, Xoxoday has department-specific Slack channels for things like DevOps and CI/CD, which complement those Slack Connect workspaces with third parties. When relevant, any engineering team member can step in to help, offer support, answer questions and quickly get to the bottom of any issue, allowing the team to move faster and with great efficiency.

“One of the biggest advantages of Slack Connect is that it’s completely transparent,” Mohan says. “I don’t need to educate my team on specific topics or trends because they’re already privy to that information in the channel.” Anyone who joins can scroll up and immediately see the full context and history of what the team’s already accomplished. This eliminates redundancies and leads to fewer roadblocks. 

Mohan has also noticed that more teammates are stepping up to tackle challenges. “Since we’re all communicating in real time, everyone is held accountable, and delivers,” he says. 

“One of the best advantages of Slack Connect is that it’s completely transparent. I don’t need to educate my team on specific topics or trends because they’re already privy to that information in the channel.”

Srivatsan MohanChief Technology Officer

Helping teams build stronger cultures from anywhere 

No matter where employees choose to work, Mohan’s team wanted it to make it easy to stay connected and engaged. “How do you improve culture, facilitate bonding and instill a sense of belonging in your employees?” asks Mohan. “We recognise work well done in Slack with a new framework called Empuls.”

Xoxoday’s Empuls app practically automates engagement by enabling three things: Employees can share actionable feedback, recognise colleagues and receive rewards for work well done, all in Slack. By building a flexible, inclusive culture that’s both scalable and sustainable, Empuls engages employees, making them more likely to be productive, have a positive influence on colleagues, and stick around longer.

From connecting with external partners and building a better product for customers to seamlessly folding integrations into their workflows, Xoxoday’s teams knew Slack Connect was the right call. “Our engineering, marketing and product teams wanted Slack,” Mohan says. “It’s our tool of choice, and we’re very passionate about it.”