One of the common questions we get when talking about our software, whether that is employee incentives with gamification, or gamified speech analytics, is what the ROI is.
Typically, the people we talk to early in the sales cycle understand the ROI. They know how Snowfly will help improve the company culture, and create an environment where you have more cohesiveness, higher employee satisfaction, and an increase in productivity. They know these things impact outputs like increased sales, happier customers, higher customer retention, etc.
Much of this is a gut feel.
The problem with the gut feel is that it is hard to describe or explain to others. Sure, you can explain it fairly easily to your team or to colleagues, but when trying to explain the benefits of these new types of programs to executives, it can feel harder.
Why? Because executives love to use data to make or justify decisions. Do they make gut decisions? Yes, of course! Especially their own gut feelings. But, with reason, they might find it hard to trust the gut feelings of others.
We have data and stories we can share that can help executives understand the ROI of our programs. We can talk about metrics that show our programs work, unusually well, compared to our competitors. We have anecdotes from customers and prospects that help us understand why other programs have failed, and how switching to Snowfly has been measurably different.
The most important metrics aren’t even how Snowfly customers have used our engagement systems multiple times longer than the average lifespan of other incentives systems, although that is pretty awesome. We must be doing what we do exceptionally well to perform multiple times better.
The most important metrics are really the metrics that are most meaningful to YOUR organization. When we start the onboarding process with new customers we strive to understand what internal metrics are important to the organization, and work together to figure out how our programs can help make a difference with those metrics. This might mean we are working to improve some internal culture or eNPS score. Perhaps your organization wants to increase retention or decrease turnover. Perhaps you want to increase any of the dozens of general call center metrics. Many of these have realy dollars attached to them, and thus, hard results.
When you talk to our sales team, talk about what metrics are most important for your organization. It’s helpful for us to understand what will be most meaningful for you. We can design the program to help hit those metrics. It’s also important for our relationship that you and we have these conversations.
What’s harder to track and understand are what I call the unmeasurable metrics. These are things like employee satisfaction and employee engagement. For example, you might have an employee who is very high performing, and his level of employee engagement seems high, but their employee satisfaction is low. This would be the case if someone is high performing but unhappy with strategy, direction, leadership, the industry, lack of career opportunities, etc. The work is getting done, the results are there, but this employee just wants to leave (and is likely entertaining offers from other organizations).
How do you measure these things? You can do surveys but it’s easy to have the wrong wording get in the way of your results. They can make the results look better, or worse, than they really are. As we see in the example above, you might see the results but the underlying issues are dangerously negative.
It’s because these seemingly unmeasurable things, culture, sentiment, satisfaction, are hard to have real metrics for that we go with our gut feel.
We’d like to help talk through this, and give you language and ideas to sell these concepts of sustainable behavior change, and the power of incentives and rewards, to your team. Just give us a call and let’s talk about it!
