Awardco is excited to announce our newest feature: External Recognition! This allows people outside your organization—such as vendors, clients, customers, patients, or partners—to recognize the people inside your organization.
Many employees frequently work with these external persons, such as retail workers, nurses, mechanics, food service workers, customer service representatives, etc. External Recognition creates an easy-to-use process for third parties to recognize these employees straight from their phones or desktops.
How Does External Recognition Work?
External Recognition is a simple feature at heart: after a customer, patient, or other visitor interacts with one of your employees, they can get on your Awardco platform to recognize that employee!
For example, if a patient visits the doctor and has a great experience with their nurse, they can scan the QR code on the back of the door and type a quick message thanking the nurse for their care.
Here’s an in-depth look at how this feature works from the admin side:
- Determine who is eligible for External Recognition based on roles, location, or other metadata
- Create forms to prompt the type of recognition and feedback you want from outside parties
- Determine which points, rewards, and budgets are attached to the program
- Add approval flows to monitor the content and reports of the program
- Make custom QR codes and employee URL links available where third parties will see them—all they have to do is scan or click to start recognizing
- Celebrate your team and reinforce value by showcasing the amazing recognitions that come in
External Recognition gives you and your team a holistic view of how behaviors are being rewarded and how your culture is shaping up. This feature ensures no good deed goes unnoticed, allowing you to recognize every contribution your employees make.
Features of External Recognition
We’ve built this feature to be easy to use and expansive in capabilities. Below are some of the most notable.
Enhanced With AI
Awardco AI will automatically flag inappropriate or personally identifying information, streamlining approvals and maintaining security.
Segment By Location
Segment recognitions from third parties by location, which makes it simple to identify and disseminate any recognition, including ones not tied to a specific employee.
Admin Approval
Admins have full control to approve, decline, edit, or even add additional points or rewards to an external recognition before anyone else sees it.
Who Is External Recognition For?
In short, External Recognition is for any industry or organization with customer-facing employees. Some of these include:
- Healthcare
- Food service
- Entertainment
- Service industries
- Retail
- Automotive repair
- And so much more
External Recognition Examples
1. External Recognition in Healthcare
A nervous patient goes to the hospital and is treated so well by their nurse that they feel more relaxed and confident that they’ll get the care they need. When they leave, they scan the QR code in the room, and type a message of gratitude to the nurse. The nurse, in turn, feels gratified that their efforts are being noticed.
2. External Recognition in Food Service
A waitress has a busy night serving full tables during the dinner rush. She does her best to maintain her friendly attitude, despite the stress. After her shift, she gets an SMS notification and sees that two families she served recognized her via the Awardco QR code at her table for her good attitude and friendly help.
3. External Recognition in Retail
An employee at a large grocery store gets asked to help someone find a specific item. They happily stop what they’re doing and direct the customer to what they need, and then get on with their day. Later, their manager pulls them aside to show them a recognition from a happy customer, thanking them for their help.
Hopefully, these three examples give you a taste of the power of External Recognition. Not only will it help you reinforce the behaviors you want your employees to exemplify, it will also ensure that they’re work is noticed and they feel appreciated in often-overlooked industries.
Why Implement External Recognition?
For those industries and organizations with frontline, offline, and deskless employees, building a culture of appreciation has always been difficult—after all, the medium for recognizing these employees efficiently just didn’t exist until now!
Below are just some of the benefits you can expect by using External Recognition. This feature:
- Boosts employee morale, engagement, and retention by showing them that their contributions are noticed and valued
- Allows you to collect, organize, and share recognitions for employees who may not be recognized often otherwise
- Gives admins and leaders more visibility into the health of your culture and the performance of your people
- Improves stakeholder relationships by showing that your organization values customer feedback
- Strengthen customer relations by involving clients in the recognition process
Ask About External Recognition
If you want to build a culture of appreciation, engagement, and gratitude for all of your employees, whether they interact with colleagues, customers, partners, or a mix of many people, External Recognition is your key.
This outside-in method of recognizing not only improves your internal culture and the employee experience—it also improves your organization’s relationship with customers, partners, and more.
Schedule a demo to learn more about this feature or talk to your CSM to ask about the implementation process.
An avid lover of fantasy books, a proud Hufflepuff, and a strong proponent of escapism, Jeff has a love of good storytelling. He relies on that for both his professional work and his writing hobby (don’t ask about the 10+ novel ideas collecting virtual dust on his computer).
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