PerkSpot

One of the great advantages to being a member of the burgeoning Chicago startup community is the opportunity to collaborate with talented entrepreneurs working on innovative business ideas. Today we officially say goodbye to Humanized, our neighbor and fellow successful Chicago startup. A majority of the Humanized team will be going to work for Mozilla and the others will be continuing to work on Songza or going to graduate school.

We have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the guys at Humanized and have tried to feed off their passion for humane user interfaces in order to enhance the PerkSpot user experience. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for the team and wish them the best of luck.

Whoever is in charge of managing an organization’s employee discount program, one of their largest responsibilities is typically fielding calls and solicitation from merchants and vendors wanting to offer a discount. These discounts represent a wide range of goods and services: a national health club chain and their wellness programs, a local ice cream shop, a regional homebuilder, an online handbag retailer, etc. Thinking about the sheer number of merchants who call and then require a response can make one’s head spin. In addition, companies whose employees highly utilize the employee discount program will often refer merchants and ask the human resource administrators to contact the merchants!

PerkSpot has the ability to adopt these employee discount programs and the associated management of merchant discounts. Furthermore, PerkSpot clients are actively encouraged to refer any inquiries to PerkSpot so discounts obtained and communicated as quickly as possible. Taking this burden off an administrator’s hands often frees up much needed time which can now be devoted to core job responsibilities, and PerkSpot’s expertise in merchant management enhances the value of the program in the first place.

PerkSpot is constantly looking for new merchants to participate in the employee discount programs that it manages. An important component to adding merchants is based on feedback and suggestions from users. In a given month, approximately one employee per thousand will suggest a merchant to be added to his or her respective discount program. For an employer with 10,000 employees, that’s two merchants per week. Realistically, the time required for a human resource administrator to bring a merchant onto their existing employee discount program is somewhere between 2-3 hours. That’s an average of 2 -3, 8-hour workdays every month!

As society continues to become more acclimated to the Internet and using it as a means for almost anything, websites have evolved and changed over time both in terms of functionality and user-friendliness. In fact, the Internet is increasingly influenced by what’s being dubbed ‘Web 2.0’—a set of trends in technology and design that are a large step forward compared to the original technologies and designs on the web.

A specific Web 2.0 trend has been to improve an Internet user’s online experience by increasing simplicity and user-friendliness. At first, many websites bombarded a user with information and navigational options. PerkSpot has balanced both the need for information and the need for simplicity to create a user experience that is organized, consistent, and easy to understand. We believe that the friendly user experience is a large reason we hear so many praises about our employee discount programs. And because we customize each client’s PerkSpot site to include any merchant relationships they’ve had in the past, employees immediately see the value in aggregating the employee discounts into a ‘one-stop-shop’ accessible from both home and work. Not only can human resource administrators give their employees a highly appreciated extra benefit, they can save employees substantial amounts of money with the savings they’ll accumulate using PerkSpot.

PerkSpot helps fulfill a recently developed void for companies and their talent management strategies: restoring the employer-employee bond. Previously, employers proposed ‘if you are a reliable worker, I will guarantee you a job and benefits for the life of the company’ and employees responded ‘I am grateful for this job and will work hard for you until I retire.’ Outsourcing, the dot com era, the exodus of baby boomers from the workforce, spectacular company failures and corporate scandals have all contributed to the dissolution of this bond. As all industries must do, human resources departments and talent management strategies must evolve to survive and potentially capitalize on these trends.

To deal with these larger problems and changes, companies have discovered new ways to build employee loyalty. Further proving this underlying change, an entirely new industry has emerged that caters to building a strategy around recruiting, developing, and retaining employees. PerkSpot was created to help fulfill this need by offering customized employee discount programs that serve as an added perk for company employees. PerkSpot can help showcase additional voluntary benefits that might just give a company that extra edge needed to achieve success in its employee relations. PerkSpot also gives human resource administrators more time to focus on their core job responsibilities by maintaining the employee discount program, managing merchant relationships, and marketing the program to company employees.