GiftCard Partners Blog

In the age of social media, a constant news cycle and a constantly connected consumer base, we all know how important it is to keep customers happy. Happy customers can mean free marketing and public relations in the form of brand evangelization through social media. Unhappy customers can have the opposite effect, casting a negative shadow on your organization's brand through social media or consumer reports. Customers are happy when they have positive interactions with your brand, and when the people who represent your brand, your employees, have a positive effect on the customers. When your employees become true ambassadors and do all they can to positively represent your band to consumers your employees are happier, your customers are happier, and your revenue will grow and gain potential. The importance of happy employees directly correlates to the happiness of your consumers and the strength of therelationship your consumers develop with your brand. Using employee rewards and recognition is a great way to ensure employees represent your brand appropriately, and develop positive consumer relationships. All levels of rewards can fit into an employee rewards program. From a small denomination gift card to a retailer like Boston Market, or Burlington Coat Factory for a well handled consumer interaction, to a weekend getaway for the employee with the highest promoter score, or lifetime value assessment. Employee rewards programs can be tailored to any budget, but their value proposition will always be felt in a big way. Happy employees, happy consumers, and measurably increased revenue.
For more information on using employee rewards to ensure happy consumers check out this article from xceleration.com

Everyone likes cash, but as a performance reward, it is impersonal and predictable. Giving employees personalized rewards can help your organization retain happy employees who know their organization cares about them and their individual interests. Richard Rosenblatt, Chairman and CEO at Demand Media goes to extended lengths to ensure his top performing employees receive personal rewards by spending a whole day with employees delivering reward experiences, such as a day with a personal shopper at an upscale department store for employees who like shopping and fashion. Rosenblatt explains the importance of delivering personalized rewards for top contributors because it shows that the organization takes a vested interest in employees, the way employees spend their time and energy investing in the organization they work for. This supportive environment keeps employees happy, satisfied, and contributing to your organization for longer. Reward personalization can be scaled down to a more streamlined system. Gift cards can serve as a great alternative to cash rewards, and can provide personalization to employees as well as a "trophy value" that cash bonuses cannot. Providing a choice of a diverse group of retailers for employees to choose their reward, as well as having one physical item to give employees makes gift cards a win/win choice for employee rewards. Being able to provide an AutoZone gift card to the auto enthusiast, and a Cheesecake Factory gift card to the restaurant enthusiast will allow your organization to deliver thoughtful rewards, while streamlining the reward system.

It’s not always easy to instill the message of safety within your workforce. So nip the issue in the bud from the very beginning: in the training process. Every employee who is required to follow the guidelines put forth in a safety program should go through this type of training. And to get the most out of this training
Safety Daily Advisor
put together,
50 Tips For More Effective Safety Training.
Here are a few do’s and don’ts from the report.
DO
give handouts,
DON’T
make them as hard to decipher as a 10 year olds art project.
Couple of interesting facts to consider, 90% of what people are told is forgotten within 24 hours and people process written information two times faster than the spoken word. Your handouts should reinforce your basic message, keep the attention of the reader, be easy to follow, and provide a reference point to readers in the future.
DO
consider using a little humor to reiterate your message,

but

DON’T
force it by incorporating
100 Funny Jokes to Tell Your Employees
book.
A little humor gives you the chance to wake up an audience that might be fading at the sight of too many safety statistics and OSHA guidelines. Experts say that using humor can relax an audience, making them more willing to participate. Which takes us to our next
DO.
DO
encourage interactive training,
DON’T
forget the incentives.
Encourage your workforce to get invested in their training program by getting creative with incentives. Create a short quiz at the end of each section, break the group into teams and play a trivial game about rules and statistics or have workers give safety demonstrations themselves. Then reward winners with small denomination gift cards to places like
CVS/pharmacy
or
AutoZone
.
Check out more great tips, news and advice for getting the most out of your company’s workplace safety program from
Safety Daily Advisors
.

Customer Relationship Management systems are vital to an organization's success. It is how the sales and services teams manage clients and prospects, without whom no company would exist. Some may even so far as to say the CRM system is the lifeblood of the company, with its maintenance being crucial to success, even if it is not a main responsibility. However, many employees are too busy and unmotivated to maintain a current CRM database. The maintenance work is tedious and time consuming and most employees push it off for a slow day that may not come for months. Gamifying your CRM system could be the solution to motivating employees to keep the CRM database as current as possible. Offering point systems that keep track of work done within the CRM system, which employees can then redeem for rewards creates friendly competition among co-workers and real life incentive for employees to get their work done as efficiently and effectively as possible. Offering flexible rewards such as gift cards to a diverse array of retailers such as
The Limited,
The Children's Place,
Boston Market and
NutriSystem gives employees an opportunity to choose from a reward that is valuable for them. Redeeming gamification points, in addition to trying to out play (or work!) colleagues will create healthy competition, increased productivity, and a motivated workforce that is happy to do even the most mundane tasks.