
Cooleaf Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2022

As an employee experience platform, Cooleaf empowers companies to engage and motivate their staff by capturing employee sentiment using pulse surveys, performance incentives, and bringing employees together with recognition and virtual activities.
- Full platform for all things employee engagement, not just rewards and recognition.
- The Slack integration is very seamless. Challenges, posts, and recognitions can all be gathered within dedicated channels in your team’s Slack workplace, if you want to.
- Wide variety of rewards including a team store, donations, entertainment, travel experiences, merch, products, and restaurant coupons.
- For some of the workplace culture-building features, like challenges and activities, you can’t create your own, so you rely on how often Cooleaf’s team makes them available.
- We found the support center’s documentation to be somewhat limited in comparison to similar tools. Also, it seems like support is only done through an online form, no other channels are available.
What's Inside
Cooleaf is an employee experience platform that helps companies build an engaging and fulfilling workplace culture for employees. This is achieved via virtual experiences and challenges, meaningful recognition, performance incentives, rewards, and strategic listening.
Their selection of activities for ensuring employee recognition and rewards are built by experts who work with different industries and teams. The programs are focused on learning and development, DEI, and health and wellness.
Cooleaf also offers a Zapier integration that enables the platform to incentivize and reward employee actions like hitting milestones, sending newsletters, closing sales, etc.
The service reviews and renews their engagement programming with partner companies every quarter. This approach has gotten them multiple awards in recent years.

Cooleaf is definitely worth considering as a full employee engagement suite of modules. Those looking for a simple rewards and recognition or performance management tool might find it to be too broad for their current needs.
Shipt, Orangetheory Fitness, SalesLoft, Toyota, Synovus Bank, Yokohama Tire, Kids2
- Cooleaf has a customer retention rate of 98.74%
- They have an ARR run rate of $4.5 million.
- Cooleaf has an average customer adoption rate of 90+%
- 60,000+ users served
- 3+ million recognitions done through the platform
- Team Recognition: This empowers companies to celebrate life events, team workplace achievements, employee anniversaries, etc.
- Rewards Programs: Cooleaf enables organizations to incentivize workplace achievements using merch, digital gift cards, and various reward options all fulfilled by the platform.
- Pulse Surveys: The Pulse Surveys allow businesses to gather real-time employee feedback and take action.
Cooleaf also has capabilities for:
- Performance incentives
- Dashboard and custom reports
- Employee programs
- Customer experience
- Virtual and hybrid team challenges
- Integrated social feeds
- Community building challenges
- Employee engagement tools focusing on learning and development
- Quarterly review and renewal of partnerships for relevant employee experience solutions and rewards
- Guided onboarding with Experience Experts
Cooleaf can integrate with Zapier, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesloft, Zendesk, Workday, Lattice, Namely, Okta, and Front.
Cooleaf offers custom pricing via a monthly subscription model based on the number of employees included in the program. Companies using the solution have to allocate a rewards budget for employees. Of course, this budget is flexible.
Cooleaf's implementation process utilizes webinars, workforce training, and various resources to get employees familiar with the platform. The training incentivizes managers to lead Cooleaf adoption using targeted training.
The company's goals and objectives are taken into account in the implementation process as Cooleaf's Employee Engagement Experts create personalized road maps on how to get the most from the tool.
Implementation also includes a 30, 60, and 90-day check-in where Cooleaf's Engagement Experts review usage and adoption metrics to aid progress.
- Cooleaf helped Synovus double the number of bankers hitting sales goals after 1 quarter using employee training programs and incentives.
- Developing incentives for Shipt boosted performance milestones by 20%.
- Woodward Academy employee engagement rose by 88%
Cooleaf was founded in 2016 by John Duisberg, Prem Bhatia, and Sarwar Bhuiyan. The three have a very interesting combined background in business administration and tech. Interestingly, one of the founders mentors at Techstars.
This leadership triumvirate aims for their multi-disciplinary team (marketers, sales professionals, developers, designers & more) to always be mindful of improving the employee experience at every workplace they service. That’s the end goal of the company.
In the words of one of their founders, John Duisberg, “life is short, so why not love the place you work? We have a passion for helping to connect individuals and teams inside an organization by creating a stronger workplace community.”