Why We’re Different: Our Employee Rewards and Incentives

Choosing an IT partner is one of the most important decisions a business can make. Technology is central to the way businesses – and not-for-profit organisations – work, and it’s vital that your chosen IT service provider understands the distinctive needs of your company.

There are, of course, many points to consider when choosing a managed service provider. In particular, you need an IT partner that has a solid grasp on the latest technology trends, the ever-evolving cybersecurity threats facing your business, and that offers the scalability your business needs as it grows.

Choosing the right IT provider, then, can have a major bearing on the future success of your business. But some MSPs have commission-based reward schemes, which can mean that vested interests take precedence over the needs of your business. Here’s what this could mean for your organisation – and why Solsoft’s approach is different.

The dangers of commission-based rewards schemes

As we’ve just noted, a lot of IT providers choose to reward their staff by giving them a commission on sales. This gives their staff an incentive to push tools and services on clients – even if they don’t necessarily represent the right solutions for their specific requirements.

Commission-based rewards can certainly motivate employees, but there’s an obvious potential contradiction between what serves the interests of staff and the best interests of their clients. After all, clients need objective advice when it comes to the tech investments they make.

For example, commission-based employee incentives can lead to pushy sales tactics, with staff – whose clients need them to be honest in their recommendations – trying to pressure clients into purchasing a particular product or service, prioritising their own short-term gains over the long-term needs of their customers.

This can therefore mean that clients are sold products or tools that are, in reality, of little use to them. By the same token, it can result in an all-round, substandard level of customer service, causing clients immense frustration and hindering them in their attempts to grow their business.

The Solsoft approach to employee incentives

It goes without saying that employees must be properly rewarded for the work they do. A dedicated, experienced and knowledgeable team of experts is worth its weight in gold – and a well-designed scheme of rewards and incentives can provide them with healthy motivation.

However, at Solsoft, we don’t reward our employees in the form of commission on sales. This is because, as we’ve already discussed, an incentive-based approach can have perverse outcomes – with the needs of the client taking a back seat. This is something that we actively work to prevent.

Instead, we use a system called CrewHu. Each email we send to our customers invites them to provide feedback on how we’re doing via the CrewHu system. Once they’ve clicked through from the email, customers can leave a rating and a comment to provide us with their feedback.

This then feeds through to our Power BI board, which provides us with a comprehensive overview of customer feedback data, including our overall customer satisfaction rating (which consistently tops 97%).

At the end of each week, the member of the Solsoft team with the best rating on CrewHu receives 1,000 points, equivalent to £10. These points can then be banked or swapped for vouchers which can be redeemed at various retailers and other outlets. The employee of the month, meanwhile, receives 2,500 points.

We actively encourage our customers to provide rate their experience, not only because this gives us a reliable barometer of how we’re performing but also because it directly affects the points allocated to our staff. This ensures that our team get the rewards they deserve for the excellent service they provide, without distorting incentives so that they compromise our advice to clients.

Conclusion

Here at Solsoft, we take great pride in the exceptional level of customer service we provide. We also go out of our way to ensure that the advice we give to our clients is entirely objective and based on a clear-eyed assessment of what they need – which is why we don’t pay our team commission on sales.

Instead, we use CrewHu to provide our team with fair rewards and genuinely effective incentives. Because CrewHu points are allocated based on customer feedback, this ensures that it’s in the personal interests of our colleagues to provide clients with genuinely useful insights and advice.

What’s more, our virtual CIO and technology alignment managers provide SMEs and not-for-profit organisations with access to strategic IT expertise at a fraction of the cost of other options. Our feedback-based approach to employee incentives helps them to take a long-term approach to tech strategy, one that isn’t based on maximising short-term sales. Solsoft is more than just a managed service provider – it’s an IT partner. Get in touch with our friendly and helpful team today to find out more about what our IT expertise can do for your business.