Empowering Stakeholder Management to Optimize Results and Experiences

CarltonOne is trusted by some of the world’s most successful organizations to create and run customized recognition, rewards, incentives, loyalty, and gifting programs. Our Enterprise Engagement technology enables organizations to communicate with, equip, and engage stakeholders across multiple platforms, devices, and geographies. Uniting all our platforms is our eco-action model that turns every transaction into direct funding for tree planting and community-building around the world.

Many organizations recognize the value of traditional employee recognition, gifting, or incentive programs. However, a new generation of broader, more integrated Enterprise Engagement platforms can help inspire and engage stakeholders across every level of a company — sales and non-sales employees, distribution partners, and even customers.

Aligning Engagement Activities Towards a Common Purpose and Goals

The primary goal of an engagement platform is to do for engagement what customer relationship management (CRM) software has done for marketing. While organizations can have separate gifting, incentive, recognition, wellness, or other initiatives, an integrated Enterprise Engagement platform can optimize every stakeholder touchpoint, including:

1. Communications — getting the story out to each stakeholder in an engaging and inspiring way that reinforces the organization’s goals and sets clear expectations.
2. Feedback — creating an open channel for stakeholders to make suggestions or alert the organization to challenges.
3. Stakeholder voice — collecting real-team information on how people feel.
4. Learning — creating fun ways for people to learn new skills that support organizational purpose and goals.
5. Community — creating organizational social media walls, peer-to-peer recognition platforms, and manager-to-employee recognition programs to reinforce the organization’s purpose, values, and goals.
6. Recognition — keeping all stakeholders focused on their goals by expressing appreciation in an authentic and meaningful way.
7. Incentives — encouraging performance through means that don’t get confused with compensation.
8. Referrals — making it easy for employees, customers, and other stakeholder to recommend the organization in ways you can measure.
9. Wellness, health, and safety — motivating employees to focus on achieving health goals and enhancing safety in the workplace.
10. Support — providing special benefits that add value to the relationship between the organization and its customers, employees, and other stakeholders.
11. Rewards — offering stakeholders the right selection of rewards (including brands, gift cards, or travel) based on the campaign and audience demographics.
12. Unprecedented Predictive Analytics — Gaining real-time information on which practices lead to the accomplishment of organizational goals and the ROI in both financial and other terms related to organizational purpose.

CarltonOne’s technology enables organizations of any size to control all the factors above through integrated programs that optimize organizational performance.

Engagement Portal Features

Depending on their needs, customers can use CarltonOne's engagement technology to create targeted gifting, employee engagement, rewards and recognition programs or easily scale their programs to address other key corporate goals like sales, quality, productivity, health and safety, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and more.

What are the components of an engagement platform that help companies tackle these corporate goals? Here are five basic elements:

1. A seamless way to communicate the organization’s purpose and brand. By making different versions of a single platform available to different stakeholders (like an admin portal for program admins and a member portal for employees), an organization can share information with audiences in the way that best suits each group.
   
   
2. A means of aligning engagement activities. As is in the world of total quality management, effective engagement management aligns communications, assessment, learning, rewards, recognition, and all other tactics to engage, inform, equip, and empower stakeholders.

3. A central platform offering analytics on all participants and activities. The ability to measure engagement with customers, distribution partners, employees, and communities that allows you to adapt and update strategies when needed.

4. The ability to issue points that employees can redeem for rewards distinct from compensation in any type of performance, incentive, or recognition program.

5. A means of integrating the following:

• Overall branding messages
• Surveys and other assessment tools
• Communications and community (including company information, profiles on people and products, how-to information, benefits, internal social media, and more)
• Learning, including tests and games
• Innovation and collaboration efforts
• Rewards for each audience, when applicable
• Manager-to-employee and/or peer-to-peer recognition
• DEI
• Health, wellness, and safety
• Benefits in the form of employee discounts and perks
• ROI (financial and non-financial) and analytics measured by correlating engagement activities by group and on an individual level with desired outcomes, as well as generating actual participant data for additional analytics

Engagement Platform Evaluation Checklist

Use these charts to evaluate the features of the Enterprise Engagement technology you are considering.

Business Models

As with CRM software, Enterprise Engagement technology is increasingly delivered through the software as a service (SaaS) model. Those buying Enterprise Engagement technology may encounter the following business models, sometimes in combination. Buyers should also be aware that all options might include a set up or customization fee, based on specifications.

1. CRM model — Monthly per-seat charges with additional fees for rewards redeemed.
2. Traditional incentive industry model — A base monthly fee with additional fees for rewards redeemed.
3. Pay for performance — A base monthly fee with additional fees both for points earned and points redemption.