As a leading agency there is rightly an expectation that we will share our extensive knowledge and experience. Most of our clients would acknowledge that their initial project brief or tender document did not have the benefit of external thinking or best practice insight from other businesses and sectors.

We have a proven method of thinking that helps our business show how we work and what we believe. Being the leading provider of online motivation solutions means we have to believe there is a way to do things and a way not to do things. Without this approach we cannot develop functions and processes that provide clients with off the shelf solutions that are proven to work.

Our approach to employee recognition does not to start with reward, costs, budgets, data or any other obvious component. Our starting point and interest is in how your directors, managers and staff say a simple thank you or congratulations.

Should a recognition programme include a non financial element?

Successful recognition programmes are always structured with the following six objectives at their heart:

• A non-financial mechanism to say thank you, well done and congratulations
• Capture the moment by making people feel happy, proud and appreciated with instant recognition.
• Rewarding performance excellence across all roles and skills.
• Must compliment and enhance your company reward package.
• Supporting the companies values by encouraging specific behaviours.
• Empowering managers to express themselves and motivate people.

Our experience shows that including a non financial mechanism ensures that the other key objectives can be maximised as well as ensuring efficient use of your budgets.

One obvious example is the identity or brand your recognition programme has and it’s perception by your employees and managers. Without including and embracing recognition without a value you will guarantee your programme is only associated with a financial reward. Every business should be taking a little time to acknowledge the small things seen on a daily or weekly basis. In providing only financial recognition tools your business will miss out on providing employees with this valuable recognition due to managers not feeling them worthy of a reward. Worse still you may find budgets are being used to say thank you or well done because you have not provided managers with the correct mechanisms.

Should employees receive small gifts for working late one night or missing the odd lunch break?

Some clients think so, others do not. Our solutions provide various options to cater for this need. However, this is a thank you whether your company’s culture feels as though a simple e-card says everything or if indeed, it does merit something more. We believe a successful recognition programme has to be structured around this thinking.

From our experience a quarter of all peer to peer nominations should be handled as a thank you, less than that for direct manager recognition. Interestingly though, clients never reduce their budgets based on this recognition model. Their reaction is to increase the minimum recognition values from what have probably been £5 or £10 to maybe £25 ensuring there is a clear difference between thank you and a financial reward.

Another example of how this structure assists your programme will be clear when communicating your behaviours and values, which is the key to employees understanding the direction and personality of your company. Leadership by example, strategic thinking, acts decisively and passion for customers are just a few of the strongest messages a business can send. Providing employees with clear examples and documentation that demonstrate what your business is rewarding is essential. Having non financial recognition ensures employees and managers understand recognition is about appreciating people as much as rewarding them.

As the UK’s leading provider of online motivation solutions we try to give each new and existing client the benefit of our experience, gained from working alongside HR specialists.

For more information on employee recognition, please contact us on 0161 438 6010.

Over 10 years of product development makes Improve Motivation one of the market leading providers of incentive and motivation solutions. However we are well aware that corporate clients make decisions based on much more than leading products. Many clients rely on a strong relationship with an incumbent company or consultant to manage their needs.

That incumbent may be your business, if so you will probably operate within sectors such as event management, sales promotion, HR consultancy, consumer marketing, creative and new media or fulfilment.

Improve Motivation has been leading the development of internet based reward and performance management applications for many years. Unlike most of our competitors our business is technology led. Our technology investment supports our objective of creating a modular international system that encompasses client, administration, brand, catalogue and redemption options. To achieve this our business has had to build relationships with partners in other sectors.

How do reseller partnerships work and why is your business likely to succeed working with Improve Motivation? Our company has a track record of delivering solutions to some the world’s largest companies. Our systems have been through the most stringent of due diligence processes and our hosting facilities will satisfy any size of personnel, B2B or consumer programme.

Our partners have made a strategic decision to up sell reward based solutions to their current client base, widen their product and service offering to new clients or have taken the decision outsource to a specialist rather than work in house.

A reseller relationship will provide you with our expertise during the sales process. Many of your clients will require technical insight as well as a consultative approach to their ideas and brief. Our people work alongside you to ensure you can provide any client with an outstanding programme, campaign or promotion.

If you think your business could benefit from working with Improve Motivation, you will soon start to ask more questions than we can answer in this article. Who handles customer services? How are your client’s needs administered? How extensive are our client solutions? Where and how is fulfilment managed?

For more information on reseller agreements, please contact us on 0161 438 6010.

Our research shows that just over 27% of UK businesses employing more than 50 people have purchased some form of multi and double redemption voucher in the last five years. The estimated turnover from these agency owned voucher products is in excess of £130 million. However, this is now on the decline as prepaid cards and point banking products offer greater scope for participants and clients.

So why have these voucher products been so popular and what does the future hold? Firstly we must look at how choice has evolved in the reward and incentive industry. Before the internet, choice was a brochure, catalogue or call centre, all of which were costly. Multi redemption vouchers gave recipients retailer choice and were very simple for clients to order from service driven agencies. However the biggest drawback in the 70s and 80s was the same as it is today, the major retailers did not want to accept the vouchers.

Top end retailers such as John Lewis and M&S do not want to dilute their brand by being associated with multi redemption voucher products. Also, they do not want to lose their significant direct B2B, B2C and employee sales, sales that may disappear overnight by accepting such products. This absence of top retailers brought about double redemption products such as our Supervoucher and it’s competitors.

A Supervoucher is a unique code on a paper certificate or within an email, this code can be redeemed online or via post and provides options from many of the vouchers, cards or e-codes available in the UK retail and leisure industry. Our Supervoucher product is a double redemption voucher that continues to grow despite a significant increase in clients turning to prepaid cards.

This may seem like a contradiction but Supervoucher is the most recent double redemption product to hit the market. It owes it’s growth to providing clients with an optional online self service system and full redemption transparency. For the first time this offers clients the visibility on how the reward is being redeemed and shows the breakage (non redeemed vouchers) which is often ‘quietly’ absorbed by the agency.

That brings us to the future of this market. With multi redemption vouchers such as Bonusbonds and High Street Gift Vouchers all now offering closed loop card alternatives it would seem that paper vouchers may not survive much longer.

There is also a question of whether closed loop cards themselves will survive when a client can use an open loop card for exactly the same price. Closed loop cards can work for salary sacrifice or employee benefit sectors where retailer discounts are passed on to the individual. However this sector also demands discounts from the top end retailers and not the mediocre.

There are surely going to be dominant open loop award cards with tens of millions in stored value, the natural progression for the agencies owning these cards will be to allow selected retailers to offer % discounts to cardholders. So are closed loop cards and their paper equivalent becoming irrelevant products and what about our very own Supervoucher?

We believe the use of codes to deliver a value, be it £s, $s, €s or points is a growing market. Supervoucher is evolving to also become a client solution, rather than just a straight voucher product. Programmes with more than one award per annum are choosing open loop award cards or point banking solutions with full merchandise catalogues. This means Supervoucher is appealing to clients looking for one off recognition, long service awards or Christmas gifts. As well as in sectors where there is a high turnover of staff or limited internet usage.

For more information on Supervoucher, please contact us on 0161 438 6010

You may have recently distributed a pre paid award card to your employees or channel network or maybe you are considering it, if so you will undoubtedly have a few questions.

There are two different types of pre paid award cards – open loop and closed loop. Both open and closed loop cards are in essence the same as the credit cards in your pocket, the difference being they cannot go into a negative balance. An open loop card can be used at all MasterCard or Visa outlets. However, a closed loop card has been locked down to a list of retailers who are willing to pay the agency concerned a % kickback.

Employee benefit or salary sacrifice programmes aside there is only one reason any client chooses to work with closed loop cards, and that is agency cost. Closed loop cards offer a limited number of well known high street brands which de-motivates participants and calls into question whether agencies are truly interested in motivating your people.

The key question is why are other UK agencies offering different charges for closed and open loop when they each use the same technology and incur the same cost.

To answer this we need to explore just how MasterCard and Visa card processors charge for their products and services. Card processor’s require any program manager to commit to an annual minimum spend of around £100,000. Card processors charge less than 1p per card transaction or load, meaning any program manager needs to invest heavily in subsidising this cost during growth.

As far as we know there are no UK agencies that have entered the market as program managers. All agencies including Improve UK Ltd are working with program managers be they gift, expenses or foreign currency specialists. To make their profit the program managers share their fixed commitment with each of their clients, often asking for £20-25,000 annual minimum commitment. They also increase the individual card transaction and load fees from less than 1p per line to around 10p.

The interesting part is there is no difference in charges from a closed loop card to an open loop one, they are exactly the same. Nor do agencies inherit a % charging model from their program manager, so why do most package their open loop card charges with 4-10% upload fees?

The answer is simple, many UK agencies have grown their business around multi redemption gift vouchers or bonds and open loop cards are a direct threat to these products. This leaves the agencies with the problem of having to charge clients a % fee to replace their lost retailer commission, a business model that is not sustainable.

Many industry specialists state open loop cards are superior products with international reach, so maybe there is an argument for these costing clients more, open loop cards are indeed superior products. However with program manager set up costs now as little as £30,000, technically aware businesses across this and other related industries are accessing this market relatively easily.

The pre paid award card market will soon be saturated, which is great news for clients.

Improve UK have shown with the Freeload award card that a fixed card cost covering a lifespan of two years is profitable whilst also giving clients a highly cost effective card program. This is only made possible by the use of fully automated processes and an industry leading cardholder website, reducing administration and card load resource to a minimum. Giving your participants a single cardholder interface that removes traditional chip and pin letters and telephone activation whilst providing instant balance and transaction access.

The industries continued shift towards online and card based awards exposes any non-solution based agency in a rapidly changing market. Improve UK Ltd offers clients a proven business model with people who understand the industry and your ideas.

For more information on pre paid cards, please contact 0161 438 6010.