Oscar Speeches and Customer Satisfaction

Have you ever heard an Oscar speech start with… I really don’t need to thank anyone, I did this all by myself, even mom and dad didn’t help.”  No you probably haven’t, because in just about every situation where you find people on the top they’ll always tell you about the other people in their life along the way, those who helped them become a success.  Nobody does it alone.

The same thing holds true for businesses that achieve a great deal of success.  In every one of them they are acutely aware of how their employees impact the satisfaction of their customers.  And they make sure to thank those employees and recognize them at every opportunity. 

A way to get the most out of your employees is to give them an emotional connection to the success. An easy technique to do that is to ensure they receive tangible recognition for their efforts.  By doing that you are essentially establishing a sense of ownership.  Often times this can lead to promotion into management and a true piece of the profits. They become satisfied employees who grow satisfied customers who become loyal customers. 

 “The Forum: Business Results Through People” found…

“a direct relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction and loyalty. By motivating and rewarding achievement, you provide incentive for employees to go above and beyond. This not only fosters improvement in communication between employees and management, but also between employees and customers.” 

This is a fact that you can’t afford to ignore.  If you have satisfied employees they will make a priority to ensure they have satisfied customers. 

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

The #1 Rewards Mistake Made 85% of the time.

This blog post is based on an article of the same title published recently in Incentive magazine by the editor, Bruce Bolger.  We’ve been reading articles by Bruce for years and he is often right on and has always seemed to have a good pulse of the industry.  However this one is a bit misleading. 

While we have no doubt that many organizations “employ little or no personalization in their loyalty, sales, dealer and employee awards presentations” it is certainly not as high as 85%, probably not even close.  This number comes from an informal survey of the leading rewards and recognition wholesalers who “found that no more than 15% of the packages they fulfill leave the warehouse with any kind of personalization.”  That would seem to assume that those same recognition wholesalers provide 100% of all the awards issued in any of the loyalty, sales, dealer and employee awards programs.  Again that’s not even close.

In addition, based on figures consistently presented in Incentive magazine regarding the various types of rewards used in these programs, merchandise supplied does not even make up 50%.  Without empirical evidence at our disposal we would venture to guess that when you added gift cards and travel to the award mix, merchandise might not even equal 25%.

We should also not forget that most reward programs found in business have a communication component and there is a great deal of budget dollars spent on the presentation of awards.  Many of the ways to personalize the presentation have already been done within these communication components.  Maybe to add additional notes or letters within the packaging of the item might be a nice touch?  Certainly it should be considered when no communications of the kind comes from within the program.  But to say that 85% are not shown this courtesy in our opinion is as mentioned somewhat misleading.

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

Most Recognition Programs Don’t Conform to Best Practices

According to a recent article from the RewardsRecognitionNetwork.com, nearly all attendees at the recent RRN Expo in Chicago agreed that most recognition programs fail to conform to the best practices revealed by almost 20 years of research from dozens of independent sources.

Since the 1970s and 1980s the Incentive Research Foundation and the Incentive Marketing Association have done a wide variety of studies on the effectiveness of properly designed recognition systems.  It appears most companies aren’t listening!  They have seemed to ignore the fundamental principles of effective design for these programs. Why?

Unfortunately, there is no way for RRN to obtain accurate data on this conclusion as most companies don’t publish their program design and most suppliers of these programs don’t either.  The evidence to support this conclusion came from “discussions with many incentive, recognition and loyalty company principals and their corporate clients, and reviewing the incentive, recognition, loyalty and promotional programs prevalent in the marketplace.”   

The two main culprits of this poor design that fly in the face of the research include:

• Focusing on only the 20% of participants to drive performance rather than the middle 60% of the organization
• Failing to integrate the many parts of engagement to actual behaviors and performance outcomes 

Having sold in this industry for many years, we might add a couple more:

• Poor industry training for companies to truly understand incentives
• Poorly educated industry salesforce who almost always take the path of least resistance in order to make the sale
• Competing vendors in the engagement industry are all vying for the same budget dollars diluting the message in favor of their own deliverable
• The recognition industry as well as clients chase the short term, quick fix profit goals ignoring more expensive designs that can lead to potentially greater long term results.

 Where actual hard dollar corporate investment is concerned, companies don’t feel the outcomes of engagement efforts can be accurately measured.  And that has been the problem for the recognition industry since inception.  Truth is that it can’t, there are just too many variables to definitively show management what they actually receive in terms of bottom line results from recognition.  It’s a soft dollar discussion.

This situation is not new.  Over 25 years ago the Industry Research Foundation did a study with the American Productivity and Quality Center that provided the best template for effective program design.  In that study there was a very enlightening yet relatively obscure fact that the overwhelming majority of clients were not using their vendors for anything but the fulfillment of awards; not measurement; not design; not analytics; not communications.  It would appear that not much has changed in the last 25 years.

Ultimate Choice contains leadership who has combined incentive & recognition experience approaching 100 years.  We also sell the single most sought after award in the industry….GIFT CARDS.  And will still provide at no charge the expertise to help you design programs that will conform to the best practices to help make them as successful as possible. 

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

Are Performance Reviews Poor Indicators of Performance?

According to a survey conducted by Globoforce and SHRM, which polled nearly 800 HR leaders, four in ten traditional performance reviews are poor indicators of actual performance.

Having been involved with employee performance improvement for decades, this result does not come as much of a surprise.  These reviews have never been consistent; they rarely contain solid measurable objectives and are always too subjective. They can destroy teamwork; they tend to be a solution looking for a problem; they rarely document what they are supposed to document; they’re backward looking when they should be facing forward.  And frankly speaking everyone (well almost everyone) hates them. Actually we are surprised that the survey didn’t find more than four of ten that were poor indicators. 

So what do you do in place of them?  This survey suggests that investing “1% or more of payroll in values-based recognition programs.”  60% of the HR professionals said their companies actually have these types of programs and those who dedicate the 1% (or more) of payroll said their programs are:

• Three times more likely to rate their programs as “excellent” compared to HR leaders whose companies do not spend that amount

• Three and a half times more likely to say their programs help to attract new job candidates 

• Nearly twice as likely to say their programs deliver a strong return on investment 

• Twice as likely to say their programs help retain employees.

Unfortunately, most companies do not spend 1% of payroll.  And that’s too bad, because the return on this investment, according to a growing body of data that supports incremental profit gained from employee engagement is mounting.  Take the time to look at your payroll data at 1% and then divide by the number of your employees.  That number may be relatively smaller than you imagine.  In many cases it’s less than $600 per employee per year ($50 a month.)  Is that too much to allocate to recognize those who really deserve it?

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