Increase market share with an internal reward and recognition program

In today’s world where experience is everything, we all know that an individual can make or break the customer experience. A more engaged and motivated workforce will lead to better retention, saving the business time and money on recruitment and inductions. Even if you ignore the fact that staff turnover costs time and money, an engaged and happy workforce will have a significant impact on customer experience. 

When asked what leaders could do more of, in order to improve engagement, 58% of respondents replied: “give recognition”. An internal reward and recognition programme should be considered as a part of a larger employee retention and engagement strategy in order to fully reap the benefits in your business..

Using Employee Loyalty to Promote Advocacy

Rewards are the physical, hard benefits (technology items, experiences, etc) that are given to your employees. Usually, they are more memorable to the recipient as they’re tangible items and have an economic value; and in the case of experiences, they can even foster lifelong memories.

Recognition, on the other hand, is one of the soft benefits that add emotional value and attachment to the company. Recognition is the emotive behaviour that represents the business culture, such as announcing accomplishments and praising behaviours or actions.

Rewards are usually associated with achieving targets, and therefore are more anticipated than recognition. Neither should be run in isolation; they work best when designed to complement each other when highlighting appreciation to employees.

If your budgets are stretched across multiple departments, and rewarding employees is where you’re falling short, then start by introducing a recognition framework which will cost you nothing. Set the structure for recognition at the outset, so that your team understand how and when recognition might be received.

Referrals

Customer and employee referrals have similar value

Content Sharing

Social engagement or sharing of articles

Testimonials

Video, audio or written testimonials that can be shared

Reviews

Written reviews that can be used the business or reviews on a specific platform

Content shared by employees attracts 8x more engagement than that shared by the business. Word of mouth advertising from your employees can have a big impact on new customer acquisition. 61% of consumers are more likely to research a product or service after seeing a friend’s social media post about it.

Getting Started with Employee Loyalty

There are numerous ways to get started with loyalty. You can either put a tender out to external loyalty agencies, or platform providers, or you can create something internally. If you decide to use an external agency to help you with the strategy, implementation and launch, then have a look at some questions we would recommend asking those agencies. This article also includes some things to think about, should you decide to run the programme in house.

Agree the behaviours and actions that you want to reward. We have provided some examples above which you might want to include initially. What is the value to the business of each behaviour and action? For example, if an employee provides a video testimonial what value does the business place on that activity.

Once you have identified the activities and the value, then you can start to build a financial model for the programme. Make sure that, when you model the return on investment, you consider what would happen if the programme were to become too successful. This sounds ridiculous, but if all your employees start completing the activities and earning rewards will the programme still be deemed successful?

Highlight the KPIs (key performance indicators) for the programme. What output will mean that the programme can be seen to have been a success? How long do you envisage that process taking, and what happens if the timeline extends or is met early? If you are using an external agency, then they should assist you with answering all these questions. Make sure that you have the data available to monitor, and that the actions are measurable, to enable you to easily assess the programme’s impact.

Create an employee focus group which will act as the voice of the employee throughout the implementation, and beyond, if that is feasible. You should use this group to assess the rewards, behaviours, actions and tactical delivery of the programme.

With everything that we have mentioned already about the rising cost-of-living, inflation being at an all-time high and employees’ salaries being stretched ever tighter, think about the rewards you can offer. We always talk about making them meaningful, but this is now going to be more relevant than ever.

Rewards that help the member to stretch their monthly budgets:

• Discounts on utility bills
• Discounts on supermarket shopping
• Discounts on insurance products
• Monthly petrol budgets
• Gym membership
• Extra holiday
• Access to staff benefits

Rewards that provide the luxuries which we might all have to do without for a while:

• Lifestyle products
• Group or personal experiences
• Travel and holidays
• Technology products

The final key thing to consider is how to design the tactical delivery of the programme. There are numerous platforms around to tap into which feature all the employee loyalty and customer loyalty tools that you would need. Consider how the programme will be able to grow with you, as your loyalty maturity grows, so that you don't have to re-platform in the future.Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

About The Author - Melanie Parker

Stream’s co-founder, Melanie, became the first British woman to become accredited with the CLMP from The Loyalty Academy. Passionate about all things loyalty, Melanie cuts through the technical jargon and gets to the real business issue. Melanie loves to develop engaging digital solutions that appear simple whilst creating long lasting partnerships that add value to all.

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