How It Works
In Cooleaf all users can give recognition, but only admins and managers can award points with recognition. Points can also be earned by completing challenges or meeting performance goals. Points can be exchanged for digital gift cards, branded company merchandise, or other physical products. You set a monthly rewards budget that determines how many rewards can be redeemed in a month. This budget is refreshed each month and unused points roll over from month to month.
Pricing
Subscription Fees
For your subscription you can expect to pay a certain amount per user, though Cooleaf's pricing isn't public and will require you to request a custom quote.
Point/Reward Budget
You determine the total value of rewards that can be redeemed by users each month. Once this limit is reached, users won't be able to redeem rewards for the remainder of the month. Since unused points rollover, this amount would usually be your organization's total annual rewards budget divided by 12 months.
Getting Started
Cooleaf has no trials or free tiers of service, so you’ll need to begin by requesting a demo and going through their standard sales process.
Once you’ve accepted their quote, Cooleaf’s approach to implementation involves outlining your organization’s goals and helping setup the basic elements of your recognition program with that in mind. Then admins are trained on the platform and prepared for launch. After launch, the Cooleaf team can schedule and run monthly engagement activities along with custom activities designed to help you meet your goals.
Ease of Use
Cooleaf’s user interface is fairly modern, though some parts of the platform feel outdated.
Navigation for the typical user is simple. Primary actions like giving recognition and interacting with the feed are obvious as soon as a user logs in. Menu options for other actions may not be immediately obvious since they are represented by icons, but once you know what the handful of icons mean, this approach minimizes clutter in the user interface. And it’s easy to expand menu options to quickly see what they mean.
Admin users can access a separate set of menus in the admin panel. In the admin panel, account management activities are divided into intuitive categories so you’re rarely struggling to find a particular setting.
Reward Catalog
Cooleaf’s reward catalog features hundreds of gift cards for all kinds of major retailers and different kinds of experiences. They also offer a variety of physical products that Cooleaf fulfills and ships and themselves. They can also offer an in-house company-branded merchandise store. This lets users spend points to buy a variety of products branded with your company logo while Cooleaf handles all the inventory and fulfillment.
If you have your own company merchandise or other things you’d like to add to your rewards catalog, you can do so with custom rewards. You can further customize your catalog by removing any of the default items you don’t want shown in the catalog.
Most of Cooleaf’s rewards are available primarily in the US, which can leave some limited options for international employees, though there are prepaid Visa/Mastercards which can be used globally.
Integrations
HRIS
Cooleaf has a few pre-configured integrations with leading human resources informations systems (HRIS). These kind of integrations let you automatically keep your Cooleaf users up to date by syncing with your HRIS. For those HRIS that Cooleaf doesn't have default integrations for, Cooleaf can be setup to regularly receive a user file from your HRIS to sync your users.
SSO
Cooleaf provides single sign on (SSO) integrations with a few of the leading SSO providers like Okta, Onelogin, and Google. SSO lets your users access Cooleaf with the same login credentials they use to access all other business applications.
Common Tool Integrations
Collaboration: Cooleaf has the standard business communication integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams as well as an integrations with Facebook Workplace and Google Chats.
CRM: Cooleaf integrates with sales platforms like Salesforce, SalesLoft, and more, allowing you to automate awards based on KPIs like new leads and accounts.
Helpdesk: integrate Cooleaf with platforms like Zendesk and Freshdesk to automate rewards based on chat response time, call wrap-up time, and email response time.
LMS: Integrations with leading learning management systems, including Litmos, Lessonly, and LinkedIn Learning, allows Cooleaf to automate awards based on completing lessons and continued education.
Additional Integrations
Cooleaf can also integrate with popular fitness tracking devices like Fitbit to automatically rewards employees for completing step challenges setup by the company.
There is also a Google Chromer browser extension for Cooleaf that allows you to instantly send recognition from your browser without having to navigate to the Cooleaf site.
Analytics & Reporting
Cooleaf’s reporting dashboard has a decent set of graphs with a good range of filters to dynamically drill into data. There are also more than a dozen reports that can be downloaded and opened in a spreadsheet program. These default reports cover a variety of metrics that will provide insight into the activity of your account. More granular data will, of course, require taking these reports and performing your own data analysis, but the default reports cover most areas of interest.
Support
Cooleaf’s primary method of support is via email. You can also schedule meetings with your Customer Success Manager, but your primary contact for most support issues will be Cooleaf support.
Cooleaf’s help center features articles that cover all the basics and then some, but is lacking in its coverage of more advanced topics like integrations and configuring automations. Most help articles are accompanied by a video in the form of a GIF, but they can move very quickly making it difficult to figure out what’s going on and requiring multiple viewings.
Additional Features
Pulse Surveys
Cooleaf lets you create simple surveys to gather feedback from users. Surveys show within the the interface and can be accessed from any page a user is on. Question types for surveys include Single Choice, Checkboxes, or Short Answer.
Mobile Apps
Cooleaf has mobile apps for Android and Apple devices that retain most of the functionality found on the main Cooleaf site.
Calendar Events
In Cooleaf you can create incentivized in-person or virtual events with in-app registrations and check in. These can be for things like one-on-ones, leadership development training, and socializing after hours.
Additional Notes
- Users can make general announcement posts to the feed not tied to recognition.
- There is basic employee directory that shows all employees (profile pic and title) and teams and can be filtered by team or tags associated with profiles.
- Can create gifting pools that allow certain users to send gift cards to people inside or outside the organization.
The Bottom Line
With its emphasis on top-down recognition and earning points by completing challenges and meeting KPIs, Cooleaf could be a great fit for those looking to incentivize performance in their organizations, but less so for those seeking a more peer-led recognition culture.
