How It Works
In Awardco, the types of recognition are divided into “recognition programs”, each with its own set of rules, users, rewards, and budget. In monetary programs, earned points can be used for Amazon products, hotels, tickets, company swag stores, gift cards, and charitable donations. Accounts must be funded up front in order to assign points to different budgets. This can also fund automated care packages, plaques and other things sent to users for designated milestones.
Pricing
Subscription Fees
Ultimately your subscription fees will depend on how many recognition programs you want to setup and the features you want available in those programs, so you must contact Awardco to get a quote for your company. As such, they do not have public pricing, but we've seen initial proposals for a standard feature set come out to ~3.50 per user per month.
Point/Reward Budget
This will depend on how many points you want to allocate to your recognition program. Whenever you need to refill your points, you must add more funds to your account.
Getting Started
Awardco doesn’t offer a free trial or free tier of service, so to begin using the platform you must progress through a standard Sales process that starts with a sales demo.
However, once you’ve signed an agreement, the implementation process is extensive. Your assigned Implementation Consultant will assess your company’s needs, build your recognition programs, test the configurations, train you on how to use the platform, and prepare you for onboarding users. You can expect this process to take between 1-2 months.
While somewhat lengthy, the complexity and extensive configuration options of Awardco makes such an elaborate process a requirement. It takes a lot of heavy lifting off the account’s admins and ensures a fairly smooth implementation and onboarding experience.
Ease of Use
Awardco has a nice, modern look, for the most part. Some portions, like navigating the Amazon rewards catalog, can be clunky, but navigation is reasonably intuitive.
For basic users who will mainly be looking at the feed, giving recognition, and redeeming points, Awardco makes it simple with a main menu header that has just those options.
The admin side is where things can get complicated. Admin menu options are spread across multiple submenus that do make sense, but the sheer number of options can feel overwhelming. It can be intimidating to even begin looking for particular features, settings, or functionality. You may often find yourself leaning on your Client Success Manager or support for any settings you don’t use frequently.
Reward Catalog
Awardco has a near-endless rewards catalog thanks to its partnership with Amazon Business. This lets Awardco users use their points to buy products from Amazon. However, only items warehoused by Amazon are available, and even then it can be difficult to find certain items in Awardco that show up on Amazon.com. Still, this by itself would give Awardco an incredibly large rewards catalog.
However, Awardco points can also be used for Priceline hotels, concert tickets, Awardco’s built-in swag store, hundreds of gift cards, and charitable donations.
Each of the above has its own separate catalog with a variety of options. Altogether they provide a massive number of options for anything users could want, though you can add even more using custom rewards, which would need to be manually fulfilled by your company.
A few of the rewards catalogs have limited or no international coverage for foreign employees, but the Amazon partnership ensures one of their many international warehouses will be able to offer a good number of rewards to even the majority of international employees.
Integrations
HRIS
This kind of integration allows changes made in your human resource information system (HRIS) platform to be automatically reflected in Awardco. Awardco offers a small number of pre-made integrations with the biggest HRIS platforms. Other than those, you must setup a custom HRIS integration, which will involve having your HRIS regularly transmit a file containing your user data to Awardco.
SSO
Awardco doesn't have any pre-made Single Sign On (SSO) integrations, but does provide the ability to configure custom SSO, which should work with nearly all SSO providers.
Common Tool Integrations
Slack and Microsoft Teams are currently the only business communication platforms available for integration with Awardco.
Additional Integrations
Awardco has a publicly available API that lets you do things like pull reports and give recognition over API so you can code custom functionality with your recogntion programs. You can also manage your user list over API, allowing you to create custom HRIS integrations managed by your own team.
Analytics & Reporting
Awardco has a good range of reports that offer insights into most things you’d want to know. There are about 20 reports in total, all of which can be exported as CSV files for further review.
The reports dashboard offers a nice amount of filters that let you drill into the data, but there are few graphs and charts to help visualize the data.
Support
Awardco offers chat, email, and phone support. They have five different lines for international callers and all support options are available 24 hours a day Monday through Friday.
It’s worth noting that Awardco’s continued efforts to grow their immense platform means some newer features are simply lacking in support. But for the majority, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Awardco’s help center also powerfully complements their live support. Support articles are thorough in both their breadth and depth. For most things you’d need to do, there is a likely a help article that will give you every little detail.
Additional Features
Progressive Web App
Awardco lacks a true mobile application native to Android and/or Apple, instead opting for a Progressive Web Application (PWA) that works on either. A PWA is a custom web experience for mobile devices based on the standard desktop experience. Basically, it’s a mobile site instead of a separate application you’d need to download.
Using the PWA, users can do everything they’d normally do, including viewing the feed, giving recognition, redeeming rewards, and contacting support.
Additional Notes
- Can automate sending memory books, care packages, plaques, and certificates for anniversaries, birthdays, and other milestones.
- Can print any recognition as a certificate directly from the feed.
- Admins can impersonate users and users can grant specific non-admin users the ability to impersonate them.
- Uses Google translate to automatically convert the platform into user’s chosen language.
The Bottom Line
Awardco offers an incredibly flexible platform with a massive amount of reward options, but the daunting number of settings and configurations may be overwhelming for some and likely excessive for smaller companies.
