Reward programs

How to engage and manage across borders?

January 5, 2024

Incentivizing employees, building customer loyalty: rewards are a powerful lever for commitment and an obvious reason for satisfaction. But what attitude should be adopted when the scale of its application becomes international? Between local preferences, regional particularities and global logistics, the challenge may seem out of reach for an SME. Is it?

Gratitude, a universal need

Whether it's a question of employer branding or business strategy, a mark of attention is always a win-win situation, benefiting both the person making the gift and the recipient. Lack of recognition creates a desire to go elsewhere. Recently, for example, it has led to the phenomenon of quiet quitting in companies, where unmotivated employees stick to the bare minimum until they find a way out. Commercially, its counterpart is the zapper customer, a behavior facilitated by digital technology and amplified by the advantages offered to new customers at the expense of the most loyal.

Triggering a reward for each objective reached naturally increases motivation, performance and therefore productivity. And the power of rewards and incentives leads, by capillary action, to employee and customer retention when the right reward program is in place. In other words, when the reward is perceived as attractive. This perception obviously varies from one person to another. And even more so from one country to another!

A gift card to rule them all

Material gift or experience? A cultural product or corporate branded goodies? The range of possibilities is vast when it comes to rewarding employees or customers. But the way a bottle of wine is received will vary according to individual tastes and consumption habits. Some people will be more receptive to a high-tech object, others to intangible gifts (travelrestaurant, show ticketsetc.). At Partoo in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, we've opted for the gift card. This local SEO start-up, which helps companies improve their online visibility, has opted for minimum risk-taking: it's hard to disappoint when you're offering purchasing power! The gift card transfers responsibility for the choice of gift or the use of the money to the recipient. The choice is all the more pertinent in a loyalty strategy; offering yet another smartphone or gift basket dilutes the value of the gift, whereas an additional income will always retain the same appeal!

Who are the Partoo rewards intended for? "Louis Houlle, Revenue Operations Manager for the platform, explains: "Our aim is to attract new customers who already have some knowledge of the platform thanks to their Partoo customer contact. "Our aim is to attract new customers who already have a slight knowledge of the platform thanks to their Partoo customer contact, but also to thank the customers who help us grow. The gift card enables us to reinforce our reputation and our relationship of trust with our customers."

Universality and dematerialization of international awards

In Partoo's case, the reward is used as an attraction tool to recruit and motivate ambassadors - loyal customers who spread the word to help the company grow in a given market. This sales strategy is all the more relevant internationally, when the platform needs to make a name for itself in countries where the company is a new player.

The company awarded the Happy Clients and Happy At Work labels by ChooseMyCompany has chosen Sorewards to deploy its rewards for foreign markets. Partoo has opted for a universal, dematerialized gift card, which is no coincidence when it comes to international promotion. It has the advantage of being valid anywhere in the world, and can be used with the user's smartphone, eliminating the problem of logistics.

The same process can be duplicated on a large scale

"Every customer who introduces a new prospect to us will be able to receive an amount that can be used on the Sorewards application when that prospect becomes a customer," explains Louis Houlle. "Our main requirements were that customers could easily redeem their rewards in the currency they wished, in physical stores or on the web in as many places as possible, that the means of dispatch be translated into the necessary languages, but also that a space per country be dedicated on the platform interface."

Choosing a reward that's easy to deploy and use ticks all the boxes for an international program. It treats teams from the "parent company" and foreign subsidiaries on an equal footing, thanks to similar release rules and the same process wherever the beneficiaries are located.

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