Discounts platform extends benefits offering to engage employees, produces savings of more than £23K

What they needed

After surveying her 750 employees, iForce HR Business Partner Clare Spiers realised the majority were unhappy with their pay and benefits. Increasing salaries wasn’t an option at the time, so Clare began to research benefits to help extend the value of her employees’ salaries, and spoke with several companies that focussed heavily on salary sacrifice schemes.

As many staff at iForce were low-income earners, salary sacrifice wasn’t an attractive option as the employees did not have expendable income.

But when she spoke with Reward Gateway, its consultants offered something beyond just salary sacrifice programs: A discounts platform to make her employees’ salaries go further. 

From that moment on, Clare says, the decision to choose Reward Gateway was easy. “I talked to so many providers, asked my peers and researched online for a solution to our benefits gap. Reward Gateway was the first one to really understand the challenges we were facing, and tailored the conversation to us and our problems,” Clare says.

As with many organisations, budget was a concern for her leadership team. But Clare won over her HR director, CEO and the rest of the executive team with a presentation highlighting the potential ROI the company stood to gain from putting in place a robust discounts platform, and the amount of money the employees would save in the long run. With a green light and just six weeks to launch in time for the holidays, Clare began the consultation process.

How we helped

To drive maximum engagement with the discounts programme, named MiRewards, Clare reached out to her offline workforce primarily through road shows to explain how the discounts platform worked. She enlisted the help of MiRewards “champions” (programme ambassadors) to spread the word about the discounts platform, including giving the 50+ champions early access to learn the technology. Over launch weekend, more than 50% of her workforce registered on the discounts platform, which offered Cashback, reloadable cards and phone and in-store discounts offers to hundreds of retailers. The addition of the Reward Gateway Childcare Vouchers led to more than a dozen of her working parents signing up, leading to nearly £4K of insurance savings for iForce.

What they achieved

Clare and her team have found notable success of the discounts programme within the first two years, now reaching more than 550 employees with a total employee spend of nearly £276K, saving iForce employees over £23K overall. Between the employee and employer savings on the discounts and Childcare Voucher programmes, iForce saw a total ROI of more than £22K in 2015.

The mounting engagement with the MiRewards discount platform led Clare’s team to look at other Reward Gateway solutions to help communicate internal vacancies and company news that were previously only available on company laptops and a clunky intranet.

Just launched this past August, the all-in-one SmartHub® platform (rebranded as MiPlace) fit her needs perfectly to help centralise benefits, discounts and communications for her employees to access anywhere, anytime on mobile, tablet and personal laptops.