Thanks to their Amazon Business integration, Awardco is unique in basically putting Amazon’s product catalog at your disposal for employee rewards. They also have a points system for hotels, tickets, charitable donations and more.
Ratings
Ease of Use
Best For
Key Differentiator
Price
Free Trial
PROS
- Amazon Business integration, huge reward catalog for a multitude of countries.
- The platform is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese.
CONS
- Actual pricing is not publicly available, so getting started won’t be a quick and self-service process like with other companies in the space.
- With Awardco, digital and physical gift cards are ineligible for refunds.
- Only Amazon-delivered products are available from Awardco. Goods sold by third-party vendors on Amazon are not available.
- The Awardco mobile app is only available as a Progressive Web Application, not from the App Store or Google Play, which might be less intuitive for some users.
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Although they stand out mainly for their Amazon integration and reward catalog, Awardco is also interesting because of its many modules. Within a single platform, they have the tools you’d expect for rewards and recognition, like a social media feed, shout outs, and a points system. But they also have the Celebrate, Earn, and Manage modules.
Celebrate is for recognizing employees when reaching a certain milestone in their career or other meaningful moments. The folks at Awardsco felt that the usual rewards, like a gift-card or company swag or even a plaque, could feel bland compared to the meaning of say, reaching a certain tenure within the company or getting a promotion.
So, they devised this module with reward offerings like trips, experiences, and digital memory books. As with most of the platform, you can set up automated reminders for dates like birthdays and service anniversaries. This also saves you the legwork of getting managers to sign off on an initiative or colleagues to sign a card for instance, thanks to the automated emails feature.
Then we have Earn, of which we already explained a bit in the features section of this review. This basically grabs their entire catalog and makes it available to tie certain rewards to an individual or team objective. It can be used to incentivize performance or participation within an internal program. For example, an employee can get a certain amount of points if they reach 90% of their KPIs for the month, or get a gift card for attending a seminar and then sharing notes with the rest of the team.
Finally, ‘Manage’ is the part of the portal where you keep track of everything going on with your rewards and recognition activity. It’s where you’ll set a budget, handle taxes related to the rewards and recognition expenses, manage HRMS and other integrations, and get reports which can be exported to .csv.
I use Awardco 2-3 times per month. In our busy season AEP, from 10/15-12/7 each year we use it several times per week. We use it for contests, incentives, and drawings. This allows us to delight our hard-working employees to earn more cash/incentives/gift cards as bonuses and keep them motivated. We are a sales organization so that is the main purpose. Bonuses and extra ways to make money and earn gift cards to purchase the things they want like on amazon.com and many other retailers.
You can let the rewards accumulate to earn large prizes. You can have multiple ways to redeem your earnings and rewards like through gift cards or a cash visa card. You can earn discounted items that you might use for work like computer monitors, chairs, and headsets which help your performance and do not kill your pocketbook. The main reason I like this solution is that options give you freedom, you don't feel tied down to being limited to what you can choose to get for your hard-earned incentives.
We got Awardco back in 2020. We were incentivizing employees with Venmo by sending cash and that was a wreck from an accounting and logistical standpoint. Awardco lets you give employees gift cards, visa cash cards, swag, company products for improved performance, etc. I have personally used this platform for over two years. The selections of products and offerings are great and diverse.
The way to navigate the website is not that user-friendly, like how to find the cash visa card, you have to call customer service to get instructions to locate it. The way you have to find retailers for gift cards is to scroll through endless companies when it would be nice just to search for a specific offering or company instead. I don't like how they do the confirmation for redeeming items. It doesn’t feel very secure. I actually had my rewards sent to the wrong person one time and I lost that money and never got it back. I wish they could let you recapture your funds if they were sent to the wrong place due to confusion in placing your orders.
This is pretty unique and comprehensive to other platforms. It gives you great variety and selection. Everyone loves choices and they deliver on that front.
Will your employee feel comfortable using the platform since it is not always intuitive? What cost is going to be involved internally to administer within the company on top of the cost of the service? How are people going to take advantage of what they earned upon departure from the company?
They have increased their selection and customer support so you don't have to rely so much on the employer to provide support to use the platform.
Sales People! Customer Service agents with good metrics. Lower-level employees that are motivated by small token amounts of money.
Construction, medical industry, or basically any role that is not rewarded for performance.
We primarily use it for years of service awards. So when someone hits a milestone they get an auto email from Awardco with our thanks to them and how for them to sign in. They can then sign in and use the points we provided them based on their years of service to provide a gift.
It's pretty user friendly. Their customer service does pretty well. And they usually assign you a rep to help.
We were previously with OC Tanner and were very disappointed with their service. This prompted us to look elsewhere. We really loved the amazon integration of the Awardco platform. This allowed us to provide whatever gift the employee wanted rather than a limited list for years of service awards.
Their report tools took me a bit to figure out. I wish we could decline recognitions that are inappropriate without the recognizer knowing. Otherwise I'm pretty happy with it.
Easier to use. Better customer service. More gift options.
Service is important. Giving something that your employees would actually like as a reward. Helpful representatives. Ease of implementation. I was happy with their ease of implementation.
I haven't seen dramatic changes in our few years with them but I also haven't felt there was a need.
Our organization has a wide variety of employee types and it has worked well for all.
People that have no understanding of technology or amazon.
Assembly
Assembly
Motivosity
Motivosity
Nectar
Nectar
Awardco
Awardco
Achievers
Achievers
Awardco has plans that could be suitable for small businesses (1-100 employees), mid-market (100-1000) or enterprise (>1000). They do cater to businesses in several parts of the world and, as you can see from their client list, a variety of industries.
As far as rewards and features go, Awardco is one of the most complete tools we’ve seen. Hence, if you’re looking for a quick and simple solution to get started with rewards and recognition, for instance, a platform to send out gift cards and send shout outs, Awardco would definitely be more than what you need.
Amazon, Ford, Pinterest, Cornell, Chick-fil-A, Paramount, Pacific Life, and Hertz.
- Employee Recognition: From the same platform, you can recognize an individual or multiple team members at a time, tag a specific type of action, program, or network you’re recognizing them for, and then write a small text explaining why. Recognitions can be points or a simple “thank you”.
- Employee Incentives: Awardco also stands out for having the “Earn” module, where you can incentivize employees to reach specific goals or be part of internal initiatives (for example, a safety training) in exchange for points. The remarkable thing about this module is that it lets employees take ownership of their rewards.
- Zero Markup Rewards: Awardco’s partnership with Amazon Business means you pay the same price for products as if you purchase them yourself. You also save on shipping thanks to the eCommerce giant’s infrastructure, and avoid imports. For instance, do you have an employee in Amsterdam? Amazon Netherlands will send their product from a local warehouse.
Awardco also has capabilities for:
- Spot Recognition
- Social Feed
- Budget Manager
- Reporting & Dashboards
- Bulk Recognition
- Birthday Automation
- Onboarding Programs
- Branded rewards and UX
- Okta
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Compatible with all sorts of HRIS systems, mostly through an API or SFTP method
- Only supports SAML 2
- SSO is an option
Awardco has a $5,000 minimum annual fee. The final pricing structure would vary according to your company size and reward needs.
According to their sales page, implementing Awardco will take 4-12 weeks. Times will vary depending on the state of your recognition program and how many people it’s going to serve. With any implementation, there's a dedicated team to help with technical configurations and overall strategy.
As an Awardco client, you get a Client Success Manager that’s available by phone or email should you need any assistance. As part of their Customer Success efforts, Awardco also offers a User Support FAQ, they constantly publish content on best practices to increase the internal adoption of recognition programs. Also, their personal support is handled through Zendesk.
Although their LinkedIn lists their founding year as 2015, Awardco actually traces its origins back to 2012. Then, the company was a couple of people working on a picnic table. They started as a basic reward and recognition software platform, which we can say was a fairly novel idea at the time. The idea spread, the company kept growing and they were able to land their deal with Amazon Business a couple of years later. In turn, this enabled them to get other partnerships and keep growing their reward offering. For instance, now they can offer holiday packages or in-town experiences as rewards. Awardco are now able to cater to over 3 million users globally, in over 140 countries.
Company HQ
Provo, Utah
Number of Employees
370+
Year Founded
2015
Amount Raised
Last round was $65M in Series A funding in the fall of 2021.
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