Sebastian Aspland
3 min read
Everybody has heard the old adage that the customer is always right. I’m a firm believer in this. The only issue is that it’s hard to know what the customer really wants. We might think we know what they want, but do we really? And more importantly, do they know what they want?
The challenge at Reward Gateway is that we have to satisfy two different types of customer - our clients who buy the product for their employees, and our end users who actually use it. This is a challenge because these two groups don’t always want the same things.
The difference is a micro/macro one. Whereas our clients are concerned with the bigger picture and getting employees engaged with their benefits package as a whole, the end user just wants to get a discount in the quickest and easiest way possible.
This brings up an important question. Do we prioritise the requests of our clients; the ones holding the purse strings, or do we put the end user first?
Listening to our clients
Our clients are the ones with the agenda, and clearly it’s important to do everything in our power to support their overarching benefits strategy. We run regular focus groups to enable clients to directly tell us what problems they have and what are the most important items that would save them the most time and produce the biggest benefit.
As a result, our product has evolved over the years into the integrated benefits hub you see today, with the capacity to bolt on multiple employee benefits and host all information about the benefits plan in one place.
User-centred design
On the other side of the coin, it’s also important to engage with the end user to ensure that the product adds value and is easy to use from an employee perspective. We have actually invited some of our user base into a laboratory so that we can see how they use the site and how they respond to improvements in pilot mode.
This has led us on a journey to really improve the total experience of our site, working on constantly improving discount rates and innovating new ways to save.
Don’t underestimate the power of discounts
From the feedback we’ve had from employees, it’s clear that the discounts strand of their employee benefits portal is really important to them. Discounts are the fun side of employee benefits, and the facility to save money on shopping and services is useful to staff from all backgrounds.
An employee benefits program traditionally doesn’t represent much value to the employer, but our years of experience tell us that it’s this that keeps employees coming back to their employee benefits portal again and again. At Reward Gateway we’ve always underpinned our employee engagement platform with employee discounts, to enable cross-promotion of the entire employee benefits package.
By listening to both employer and employee, we’ve developed a powerful hook for employees while satisfying our clients’ HR & Benefits agendas at the same time.