It’s that time of year when many of our clients evaluate the employee recognition, or customer incentive programs that they sponsor with an eye toward their continuation and/or expansion in the upcoming year. Curtailment and abandonment are also options, but let’s not dwell on those possibilities! In all seriousness, whether the news is good, or not so good, we as employee recognition and incentive service providers have a responsibility to help our clients understand whether their programs are effective and impactful.

To do that, we have found that it is important to look at a range of metrics. The most important of those necessarily reside with the clients, because they own the data on retention, turnover, revenue and profit improvement and the like. In some cases that information is shared with us, which helps us immeasurably in our efforts to adjust and enhance program design parameters. Accordingly, we encourage our clients to share as much data on performance metrics as they can with us.

However, in many cases that information is closely held by our clients, for a host of very good reasons. When that occurs, we look to other metrics that we can derive from the program operation itself to give us, and our clients, a good feel for their programs’ success. Among these are measures such as:

•  award active percentage,
• period-to-period growth in point issuance, by award indicator (if available),
• redeem active percentage,
• cumulative redemption rate, and
• benchmark comparisons to composite metrics of similar programs.

We calculate each of these metrics across both time periods and programs so that relevant and meaningful comparisons and inferences about program success can be made. We would welcome the chance to discuss these metrics and their application in more detail with you. We’re confident that they could provide meaningful insights into the employee recognition and/or incentive programs that you sponsor – just as they do for our current clients.