Incentives Online Whitepaper

Author: Craig Miller
Date: May 2003
Source: Incentive Online Council

Excerpt:

Corporate America Ready, Willing, but Unknowledgeable About Using Online Incentive Programs

A recent survey has revealed an increasing reliance on Web-based technology to motivate employees, salespeople, and customers. The survey’s respondents – 171 sales, marketing and human resource managers at corporations that use incentives – indicated that motivation programs will increasingly be conducted online. Yet surprisingly, those same managers indicate they feel ill-prepared to take full advantage of the technology’s potential.

The Survey on the Use of Online Incentive Technology was conducted via e-mail in May 2003 by the Department of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University on behalf of the Naperville, Illinois-based Online Incentive Council (OIC) of the Incentive Marketing Association. Approximately half of the 171 respondents represented end-user companies while half were from marketing service firms.

Among all respondents, 65 percent indicated that they had used Internet-based software for some or all aspects of incentive programs. Of those, 60 percent used the Internet for a client, while nearly 20 percent did so for themselves, and 20 percent for both themselves and clients.

“The demand for online incentives has grown substantially,” says Michael Arkes, president and CEO, Hinda Incentives, a click-and-mortar performance improvement company based in Chicago. “I’ve been in this industry since 1997 when it hardly existed, so to see 65 percent of the respondents to our survey are online incentive users indicates phenomenal growth.”

The survey also revealed a roadblock between these companies and a greater application of Web-based technologies in the motivation of workers, salespeople, clients, and channel partners. Fully 57 percent of respondents said the primary reason for not moving incentive programs online is unfamiliarity with how the Internet can be used for such programs. Other reasons companies didn’t use online motivation were that they view the Internet as too expensive for this purpose (14 percent), and that they weren’t running formal incentive programs (13 percent).

Both motivation clients and suppliers must change the way they think about the nascent medium before clients can maximize their return on program investments, according to industry experts on the OIC.

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