5 Tips for Designing Competitive Employee Benefit Packages

A new trend is growing among human resource professionals: providing competitive benefit packages to attract more employees.

In a recent reward risk survey in the United Kingdom, majority of recruitment professionals surveyed said that the provision of relevant benefit packages is now their top priority, even surpassing the concern for techniques on employee recruitment and retention.

According to the recruiters asked in the poll, more and more HR companies are worrying that employees don’t fully understand the real value of benefit packages offered by their individual companies. Such lack of understanding posts risks for employers, as it could lead to higher employee attrition rates and unsatisfactory assessments on their company’s workforce enhancement programmes. Companies unable to provide relevant benefit packages also find it hard to implement strategies for recruitment and retention, as potential employees nowadays easily get discouraged when they hear nasty rumours about bad benefit packages in their prospective company.

So how do you design competitive benefits packages that would ensure employee satisfaction? Here’s how:

1. Beat the competition – With many companies competing for the limited competent workforce available, it is important that you ensure your company offers benefit packages that are at par, if not better, with that offered by rival companies. To do so, you should be aware of what other companies are offering, and you should be willing to surpass the said offers.
2. Be relevant – Know what your employees really need and ensure that these needs are provided. The secret to better employee recruitment and retention stats is offering what the most pressing demand of the populace is. Listen to your employees and provide incentives that matter. Rewards that are only tangential to the needs of employees are as good as nothing. For example, a generally fit and healthy but cash-strapped workforce needs more cash incentives than sick leave benefits.
3. Offer small rewards – Be it big or small, in the world of professional reward structuring, every single perk counts. Offer free dry-cleaning on Fridays, or throw in occasional free lunches and tickets to certain concerts. These things may seem trivial, but employees appreciate them, and this could really boost employee satisfaction, recruitment, and retention.
4. Give out irresistible financial rewards – With the current economic situation, more and more employees are concerned with financial security. Reward employees that meet performance goals by offering substantial salary increases, stock options, and other financial rewards. Do the math: How much are you willing to dish out to ensure employee satisfaction? You’d be surprised that it’s relatively easy to strike that delicate balance wherein you can give out raises while still keeping the business afloat.
5. Hire a third party company – If you have a relatively large workforce, it is a daunting task to keep track of each of your employee’s needs. Putting someone with a high level of expertise on providing rewards could help you focus on other matters concerning the company and ensures that your business offers the best and the latest when it comes to benefit packages for employees.

Photo Credits: Flickr Creative Commons

Extend the Initial Success of Established Customer Loyalty Programmes

With the current state of the economy, it is but wise for companies to invest in customer loyalty programmes to keep their current customers. Unfortunately, most loyalty programmes are only effective during the first few months of its launch. Many businesses employ customer loyalty programmes that allow them to convert walk-in customers into loyal patrons, but most of these businesses don’t know how to maximise the benefits of such programmes.

Here, we’ll discuss three key factors that ensure the continued success of loyalty programmes:

1. Maximise the use of your customer data – One of the great benefits of having a customer loyalty programme is that you can easily gather essential information about your customers – their buying patterns, their preferences, down to their mailing addresses.
   
   However, not all companies maximise the use of such important data. Some businesses offer customer loyalty programmes that highly depend on discount offerings and premiums. However, it’s not as profitable in the end, as these types of loyalty programmes are just teaching customers how to save a few pounds. Usually, these loyalty programmes begin to falter when a competitor offers a loyalty programme that provides a more affordable option.
   
   To address this, companies should tap the gold mine that they already possess – the customer data! Find out how you could improve your services by looking into issues such as checkout speeds, store layout, and customer feedback and competitor information. Try to do short customer satisfaction surveys and see how you could improve your loyalty programme based on your patrons’ preferences.
2. Appeal to your customers’ emotions – Again, customer loyalty and satisfaction don’t rely solely on bonuses and discounts. Successful loyalty programmes engage customers as much as possible. A long-term programme builds an emotional link between your business and customers.
   
   The loyalty programme is only one facet of the whole branding and marketing of your business. The other facets include the quality of your actual products, the benefits customers get from being loyal to your business, and even the hospitality of your employees. Try to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction by making the whole business transaction a positive experience for them. Give loyalty cardholders the VIP treatment in your stores – provide special lanes for faster processing, extra discounts, early advice on sales events, and ask your employees address them by name. Successful customer loyalty programmes even go to such lengths as mailing loyal members gifts on important occasions, like Christmas and their birthdays. Such gifts need not be expensive; it’s the thought that counts!
3. Keep up with technology – Modern technology now offers many opportunities in which you can improve your loyalty programme. The technology that allows customers to pay through their smartphones, for example, could be tapped by giving additional discounts for loyalty cardholders if they use such technologies. With these new technologies, measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction has also become easier, as you can now monitor the frequency of purchases and other trends electronically.

You can never run out of ways to improve customer loyalty and satisfaction. Always be dynamic. What’s important to remember each time you try a new promotion is to think like the customer, and create ways to ensure that your patrons feel important every time they transact with your business.

Photo Credits: Flickr Creative Commons