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Global Reward Solutions Provider's Checklist for Choosing a Global Rewards Technology to Support a Global Rewards Program
Incentive, recognition and loyalty companies can realize significant cost and time savings by partnering or licensing with a “Reward Solutions Provider”.
Here is our “Top 10 Checklist” of what a Global Rewards Solutions Provider should consider when choosing a Global Rewards Technology to support a Global Rewards Program.
1. Reward Selection: Start with the fact that you no longer need to source, select and aggregate data from many suppliers, with RMS you get one central data feed that includes every major reward category and all invoicing is centralized and paid on-line. Finally paperless accounting!
2. Global Catalogues: Few solution providers get beyond their own border but there is a growing number of Global Reward Solutions that offer a fully built out global solution. Reward delivery on a global scale through one simple API connection…now that Rewards on Demand!
3. Catalogue Management: Most Reward Management Solutions include robust catalogue management tools enabling your account team set up, filter and design client specific reward catalogues.
4. Automated Updates: Possibly the most important feature of a good RMS is the ability to automatically update all reward data but you must look for a RMS solution that offers daily and even real time data updates which ensures your clients are viewing the latest and most accurate reward selection; this feature will dramatically reduce out of stocks.
5. Order Tracking: Your RMS provider must provide you with a robust order management dashboard enabling your Customer Service team to track and verify all orders including courier tracking ID numbers.
6. Translations: Again, good RMS’s provide all data in the language of the host country, for countries like Canada and even across Europe you may need multiple languages for a single country. This is often a deal breaker for most providers since this requires specialized applications to manage dialects such as Russian and many Asian languages.
7. What’s New! Nothing stays the same and this is very true within reward management. One example of this is streaming media which will very soon replace the need for I-pods and MP3’s altogether – all you need is an account and you can build your very own radio station. Your reward provider had better be developing a constant flow of new reward delivery options as well as new sources that provide higher service levels and value.
8. SaaS White Labelled Solution: You should make sure your provider offers a SaaS solution that is fully white labelled; fully data API’s also allow your company to add your own reward display design ensuring a higher degree of personalization over i-frame solutions which are static and cannot be customized.
9. Customer Service Team: Your reward partner will also prove Tier 2 customer service support which is a dedicated team who trouble-shoot any order escalations. This is vital service and this team will be your one-stop-shop when escalations occur; be sure to ask for their Service Level Agreements.
10. Global Currency Management: When you evaluate your provider you must make sure they can also calibrate your points based on each country’s currency; this must be done on a daily basis as most currencies fluctuate daily and several countries like Venezuela have 25%+ inflation rates. Products and services that are bought locally one day are then sold to you by your provider who will convert the reward cost to your local currency and then you will in term convert this displayed your cost based on your point calculation. Your solution provider must be able to convert all costs globally to a single often US dollar equivalent and update these costs everyday!
Global Reward Solutions Provider's Checklist for Choosing a Global Rewards Technology to Support a Global Rewards Program
Incentive, recognition and loyalty companies can realize significant cost and time savings by partnering or licensing with a “Reward Solutions Provider”.
Here is our “Top 10 Checklist” of what a Global Rewards Solutions Provider should consider when choosing a Global Rewards Technology to support a Global Rewards Program.
1. Reward Selection: Start with the fact that you no longer need to source, select and aggregate data from many suppliers, with RMS you get one central data feed that includes every major reward category and all invoicing is centralized and paid on-line. Finally paperless accounting!
2. Global Catalogues: Few solution providers get beyond their own border but there is a growing number of Global Reward Solutions that offer a fully built out global solution. Reward delivery on a global scale through one simple API connection…now that Rewards on Demand!
3. Catalogue Management: Most Reward Management Solutions include robust catalogue management tools enabling your account team set up, filter and design client specific reward catalogues.
4. Automated Updates: Possibly the most important feature of a good RMS is the ability to automatically update all reward data but you must look for a RMS solution that offers daily and even real time data updates which ensures your clients are viewing the latest and most accurate reward selection; this feature will dramatically reduce out of stocks.
5. Order Tracking: Your RMS provider must provide you with a robust order management dashboard enabling your Customer Service team to track and verify all orders including courier tracking ID numbers.
6. Translations: Again, good RMS’s provide all data in the language of the host country, for countries like Canada and even across Europe you may need multiple languages for a single country. This is often a deal breaker for most providers since this requires specialized applications to manage dialects such as Russian and many Asian languages.
7. What’s New! Nothing stays the same and this is very true within reward management. One example of this is streaming media which will very soon replace the need for I-pods and MP3’s altogether – all you need is an account and you can build your very own radio station. Your reward provider had better be developing a constant flow of new reward delivery options as well as new sources that provide higher service levels and value.
8. SaaS White Labelled Solution: You should make sure your provider offers a SaaS solution that is fully white labelled; fully data API’s also allow your company to add your own reward display design ensuring a higher degree of personalization over i-frame solutions which are static and cannot be customized.
9. Customer Service Team: Your reward partner will also prove Tier 2 customer service support which is a dedicated team who trouble-shoot any order escalations. This is vital service and this team will be your one-stop-shop when escalations occur; be sure to ask for their Service Level Agreements.
10. Global Currency Management: When you evaluate your provider you must make sure they can also calibrate your points based on each country’s currency; this must be done on a daily basis as most currencies fluctuate daily and several countries like Venezuela have 25%+ inflation rates. Products and services that are bought locally one day are then sold to you by your provider who will convert the reward cost to your local currency and then you will in term convert this displayed your cost based on your point calculation. Your solution provider must be able to convert all costs globally to a single often US dollar equivalent and update these costs everyday!
What Firm Owners Need to Recognise About Cloud Computing
The Desktop Computing era has put computing power into the hands of the users, but left them still contingent upon IT to provision the back-end infrastructure such as networks, servers and firewalls. Maintenance on in-house infrastructure tends to be daunting and very costly. Whats more, disaster can ensue at anytime from drive failures, viruses, corrupt databases, server patches and the list goes on. You also need to pay for all the hardware and a team to manage it. Since application servers tend to be driven by departmental budgets, IT infrastructures often finish up as over provisioned mishmashes of equipment, processes and technology entailing overstated cost and large inefficiencies with servers operating at 15-25% of capability. Cloud servers, on the other hand, run at 75-90% of capacity. This results in less office space, hardware, staff and power necessities saving a lot of money, and the environment.
Fundamental to the Cloud Computing argument is that software is rented rather than purchased outright. Finance directors will immediately draw a comparison between the two routes and demonstrate that after typically 2.5 or 3 years, the rental payments on exactly the same resources would look to exceed the capital cost: it would thus make little sense to accept a rental agreement.
While that break-point may be right at first view, Alex Parker of Commensus reasons that there are noteworthy considerations to be taken into account. “It assumes that any equipment bought is being fully utilised from the outset. If a company has acquired IT solutions with the capacity to take it forward three or five years, for instance, it is paying for resources on which it cannot generate a return on capital. Changed circumstances may mean that the capacity is never fully taken up.”
Cloud Computing offers the chance of moving most IT expenditure from the balance sheet to the profit & loss account. This in turn removes capital expenditure, cutting operational expenditure and gives small firms the budget predictability they need. IT departments can then concentrate on the front-end issues that will enable business survival and development.
With Cloud Computing, instead of making one capital commitment to buy the hardware and another to acquire pricey software, companies effectively rent both the hardware and the software, paying only for the resources that are really employed. So you dont pay anything when services are not necessary, doing away with unnecessary overprovision of resources to appropriate for occasional spikes in requirements. Businesses can go from 20 workstations to 80 and back to 50 again in the time it takes to authorise the online paperwork. This “pay-as-you-grow, save-if-you-shrink” model works out much cheaper in the long run.
In the past, it might take a business six to eight weeks to commission an application server. Now, computing power and storage space is becoming a commodity, bought when needed and scaled up when required. This dynamic resource management is enabling organisations to react faster to market shifts and acquire an advantage over their competitors. It is this agility and scalability that persuades most companies to venture into the cloud.
But Cloud Computing is more than an IT deployment. Moving into the cloud is a cultural shift as well as a technology shift. For IT staff, and particularly the chief technology and chief information officers, it requires a rethinking of their roles. 70% of time previously wasted on operational maintenance and upgrades is then available to spend focusing on business strategy. This allows a company to take advantage of new opportunities to innovate and grow.