Wyzetalk, a leading South African mobile-first employee experience platform enabling a connection for frontline workers

Merel van der Lei is the CEO of Wyzetalk, a leading South African mobile-first employee experience platform that enables a connection for frontline workers. With 20+ years’ experience, Merel has a wealth of knowledge in business and product strategy, employee engagement and designing impactful solutions, leveraging the power of feedback for continuous growth. Recognised as one of the SEG Female Trailblazers of SaaS in 2024, she leads with empathy and is solution and impact driven. Merel has made a concerted effort to bolster and mentor females in the industry as she effortlessly navigates the fast-paced and male-dominated landscape of the tech sector.

LoA spoke to Merel van der Lei at the Start-Up Night Africa event in The Netherlands where she pitched her business to an audience of investors, government officials and business decision-makers.

Tell us about your business

At Wyzetalk our community thrives on exchanging stories and learning from like-minded women from Africa and the African Diaspora. We feature stories of companies big and small, from women entrepreneurs just starting out and from those who've been around the block once or twice. Your story matters to us and to our readers. Who knows how many women you will inspire and motivate with your story?

When did your business start?

Wyzetalk was founded in 2012 in Cape Town as a communication platform for business. In a world where the focus was on making desk workers even more connected and creating platforms and tech so they could communicate more efficiently, Wyzetalk soon found that this left a very vital and large group of employees behind: the frontline and deskless workers. I joined Wyzetalk in 2021 to lead the platform's evolution into a scalable one. Why? So we can connect the many more. In September 2022 I was asked to lead Wyzetalk as CEO on the next leg of our journey to impact – enabling impact with our solution and making impact as a South African employer.

Number of employees:

Wyzetalk has a fantastic team of 85 people, of which the majority is female, and with a rich range of experience, expertise, ethnicity and culture.

What does your company do?

Simply put: Wyzetalk is the smart solution to connect and engage with frontline workers. A connection does not only give a company instant reach – whether that is reaching everyone or a very specific subset of people – to share crisis comms or anything else they need to. It also empowers frontline workers – who are often disconnected and underprivileged – to digitally access critical information and work resources such as pay slips, leave, vacancies and rosters. Moreover, our platform opens up access to training and upskilling, team socials and a way to share feedback. We have a proven track record of connecting organisations and frontline workers in emerging markets, across multiple business sites and complex structures. When you say hello to Wyzetalk, you say goodbye to notice boards, heavy paper footprints and broken telephone or queuing systems.

What inspired you to start your company?

When Wyzetalk was founded in 2021, the aim was to solve an internal communication problem that many businesses faced: where to find relevant information, how to easily reach out, share and collaborate. What we very soon realised is that where this was just a challenge of efficiency for desk workers, it was a challenge of having a connection in the first place for frontline workers. With no access to traditional platforms such as intranet or email, they had to rely heavily on noticeboards, word by mouth via managers and queuing systems. That lack of connection and lack of access does not only hold a company back in terms of performance, but it also very much holds frontline employees back in terms of efficiency, knowledge, performance and new opportunities. That soon became our purpose: bridging the gap for the frontline through a mobile first connection. I am so honored to be at the forefront of our purpose, evolving our solution and leading our team since 2021: we are on a mission to connect the disconnected and empower the frontline to thrive.

Why should anyone use your service or product?

In a world where a connection and access seems to be at everyone's fingertips, we ensure that it actually is. There are a staggering 2.8 billion frontline workers globally, making up 80% of the working world's population. 75% of them do not have access to work information and resources, 80% are low to illiterate and 71% work in unsafe or unhealthy environments. Their day to day is filled with obstacles that hold them back from performing and thriving. The cost of that disconnect runs in the billions every year. Yet less than 1% of software investment globally is in frontline workforce solutions. It is our ambition to connect the many frontline workers, to help reduce their daily obstacles and impact business' bottom-lines by digitizing comms and processes. So what sets us apart?

We offer frontline essential and mission critical features in a data light way
We can connect through multiple channels – app, Mobi, ussd, SMS, WhatsApp and email – and in multiple languages
We can reach everyone or a very specific subset of people with critical messages in just a few minutes
We are fully secure and compliant across borders
And our clients and users love us.

Tell us a little about your team:

Wyzetalk has a fantastic team of 85 people, of which the majority is female, and with a rich range of experience, expertise’s, ethnicity and culture. Our main inhouse expertise’s are evangelists (i.e. sales), engagement and frontline comms specialists, platform magicians (a.k.a tech) and naturally our support heroes. Working hybrid, our team pretty much covers all of South Africa as well as Amsterdam and London. We get together in our home bases in Stellenbosch/ Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Wyzzies are passionate about our purpose: connecting the many frontline workers and enabling them to thrive. We do that by upholding three essential values: ownership (we own what we do), consistency (we do what we say, and we say what we do) and partnership (we act as partners – towards each other, clients, users and suppliers – and empower each other to thrive). Feedback is an essential element in making sure we do well and improve, we know when and who to support and we strengthen our culture continuously. As in any company, our team sometimes faces a situation or decision they are unsure about. My directive in those cases: make the decision and behave as though this company is your own, learn from mistakes and trust that we all have Wyzetalk's best interest at heart.

Share a little about your entrepreneurial journey. And do you come from an entrepreneurial background?

I am a problem-solver at heart, which I think is one of the most important characteristics of female entrepreneurs, despite the fact that literally speaking I am perhaps not an entrepreneur (since I haven't founded this business). In my career I have journeyed from one problem to the next, with a default and almost automatic setting to try and solve a problem or a challenge. After my degrees in English Literature and Euroculture – I was the first in my family to attend University - I started my career in public affairs (helping citizens get the answers they needed) and then moved to project coordination at the ICTY (enabling the build of an information platform). I grew to product leadership at Effectory (building a feedback platform for employees) and evolved to leading and growing a company and solution at Wyzetalk. Not a straight path from studies to a profession, nor a vertical expertise line. But it shows a clear pattern: give me a problem and I will aim to solve it. And I hope it can be an example to every woman that you can evolve and achieve in many ways.

What are your future plans and aspirations for your company?

At Wyzetalk we want to multiply our impact - to connect many more of the 2.8 billion frontline workers and empower them to thrive. But we do not intend to stop there – we already know that the connection and access we provide does not just impact a frontline worker and a business, it also impacts their families and communities. Getting access to an easy budgeting guide, simple yet effective health and hygiene tips or even quick tips on how to implement small sustainability measures and save money: these things can change communities in big ways. So we see opportunities to not just connect companies to their employees, but also their wider communities.

In the last two years we have worked hard at enabling our solution to scale across borders, regulations and cultures. We are ready for more user and revenue growth and have sustainable plans to grow our team – making use of both our collective intelligence and expertise as well as innovations to do so in a smart and effective way.

What gives you the most satisfaction being an entrepreneur?

Getting feedback on how our platform has helped a user feel more included, helped them to learn, save hours of their time or to be safe? Nothing beats that. Being a leader affords me the opportunity to solve problems small and big every day, resulting in big impact on many people: our frontline users, our clients and most certainly our own team. I am also extremely fortunate to lead a team of amazing people and to see every single day how much they want to be the difference in making our world and our users' world better. It fills me with immense pride and satisfaction to be able to enable and support our team of heroes in our journey to connect the frontline.

What's the biggest piece of advice you can give to other women looking to start-up?

Make sure what you build or do solves a problem that you are passionate about solving. Always dream big yet take pragmatic and decisive steps to get there. Every journey meets challenges and failures, don't give up, learn and then solve them. And above all: do not let other people define who you are and what you can do.

To find out more about Wyzetalk, contact Merel van der Lei via email: merelvanderlei@wyzetalk.com and also visit the company’s website and social media platforms:

Website: http://www.wyzetalk.com

Video Links:

https://wyzetalk.wistia.com/medias/lv5xfy9715
https://wyzetalk.wistia.com/medias/py6rpmwyim
https://wyzetalk.wistia.com/medias/s2no69k2df
https://wyzetalk.wistia.com/medias/lhwen7upry