RVOLPC

RVOLPC is an acronym coined by Dr. Brooks Mitchell of the University of Wyoming and founder of Snowfly, an incentive company specializing in gamification.  RVOLPC stands for Readily Verifiable On-Line Price Comparison. 

After years of study within the behavioral sciences field and firsthand experience in implementing incentive programs, Dr. Mitchell soon learned (as we have) that the traditional merchandise awards used in the incentive industry are extremely overpriced and the companies that use them run the risk of having unhappy participants, which can result in de-motivation.

With RVOLPC it is easy for your employees to compare prices of your awards on-line and

determine the real value.  Even with points based applications where the reward company attempts to hide the pricing, it’s not too difficult for an industrious web surfer to uncover the price.  Rest assured that not long after that all the employees know about it as well.  Do you think they will be satisfied with a wide screen TV that cost them (you) $2000, when they see it all day at Best Buy for $699?

There are definitely negative consequences of having an incentive or recognition award that is priced higher than even the highest retail are.

Your employees start to question many things about the program value.  They see the company wasting money at a time when budgets could be scarce.

With more and more millennials now in the workforce, the use of technology is almost inbred.  They are more than comfortable on the web, and can easily become disgruntled when think their company is wasting money.

Overpriced merchandise awards are a fact in the award industry. You can see them in any loyalty program you participate in.  If you are bound to use some of these types of merchandise systems in your incentive or recognition effort (especially long term years of service programs) you might want to consider giving your employees a gift card option.  Your merchandise award supplier will fight you on this with a lot of hocus-pocus about trophy value, but your employees know better.  When employees have a choice of gift cards over merchandise awards, they choose merchandise over 90% of the time.  

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net