We sat down with Jack Martin, founder of Payback Incentives, to discuss why he thinks now is the time for companies to change how they reward and incentivize they teams.
Editor: Tell us a little bit about Payback Incentives and what it does?
Jack: It’s a DIY incentive program, so you would access the program online and set up your own employee incentive program or ultimately your sales incentive program and so forth using the online tools, so it’s designed to be instant recognition and instant gratification. That’s the whole purpose behind it.
Editor: What makes Payback Incentives unique?
Jack: There are three things that make Payback Incentives different: price, ease and flexibility of the program, and the speed. The price, we’ve dropped the price to pretty much zero. Most programs out there are charging you a setup fee, a monthly fee, a per user fee, etc. So we just decided that there were so many companies that were being missed, not to mention the fact that there’s a lot of bigger companies being over charged.
When you’re doing an employee recognition and incentive program you want to spend the money on the incentives, not on the incentive provider. So what we did was we figured there’s got to be a way to provide this service without really overcharging on the incentive side.
Number two is the ease and flexibility of the program. We used to do custom configured software, so we’d build something for a customer. Now we’re calling it customer configurable software, so you go in and fashion the program after your needs. After customizing to your needs, you’re able to assign roles to people within the company. From here you’re able to pick and choose who can give out points, set up how many levels of approval you’d like to have, and more.
Lastly, is the speed of not only setting it up because you can get set up within a day but also the speed of deliveries. So literally you can buy points today or buy points right now and within a couple of minutes grant them to somebody, and then they can go in and redeem them and get the gift that they want. It’s all about the time between an event that happens and an employee does something that you like. They did something, achieved a core value for the company and the time between that event and them getting the reward, there’s a big gap between ‘you did this’ and 2 – 3 months later you get the reward. Well now, if you worked an extra shift or you did something special for a customer, and I recognize you, you literally could get the points and spend them that very day.
Editor: Tell HR Gazette’s audience how Payback Incentives’s new model is going to disrupt the Employee Incentives market?
Jack: Our program opens up to a whole swath of companies that couldn’t afford programs before. It also gives brands the ability to recognize people instantly, so they’re not waiting a month or 3 months sometimes to get recognized. You recognize them today; they spend the money as quickly as they want, I mean literally, even if it’s just a $5 coffee card that they want to get. Or in turn, they can give that card as a gift to somebody else in their family. Lots of ways to recognize and reward!