How It Works
The Vantage Circle platform is divided into four products: Vantage Rewards, Vantage Fit, Vantage Pulse, and Vantage Perks. Rewards is the main recognition program and allows users to give monetary or non-monetary recognition to other users. Monetary recognition options are divided into admin-created awards, each with their own point values, approvers, and eligible givers and receivers. Users’ giving balances are manually allocated by admins. Earned points can be exchanged for gift cards, physical products, experiences and events.
Pricing
Subscription Fees
Your subscription fee for Vantage Circle will depend on which products you add to your plan. The four products are Rewards, Fit, Pulse, and Perks. Each represents a major set of features that can be added to your employee recognition program. Standard pricing for Rewards is $4 per month per user, or ~$3.60 per month per user if paid annually.
Point/Reward Budget
In Vantage Circle, Points are purchased upfront. Admins can then allocate those points to specific users or groups to allow them to give monetary recognition. How much is spent on the points is at the admins' discretion, but will usually depend directly on the number of users in the account and the overall recognition activity.
Getting Started
Getting started with Vantage Circle requires requesting a demo, which will then allow you to access a fee demo they will setup for you. After initial setup, you’ll have a dedicated account manager to provide hand-held support as you familiarize yourself with the platform and setup for launch.
Ease of Use
Vantage Circle’s user interface has a clean, polished, and modern look.
Carrying out primary actions like giving recognition is simple and done without much hassle.
Each of the platform’s four products (Rewards, Fit, Pulse, and Perks) has it’s own separate tab running across the top of a user’s homepage. Each tab lets you access the configuration options for a particular product. This makes navigating the platform fairly intuitive for admins since any given feature will be tied to one of these four products and it’s usually pretty easy to guess to which one a feature belongs.
Reward Catalog
Vantage Circle’s reward catalog offers a variety of gift cards, physical products, local experiences, and event tickets. They make it easy to redeem multiple gift cards at once in large denominations, but all gift cards are only valid for one year.
Having started in India with a substantial Indian user base, Vantage Circle has relatively good offering of international options for a global workforce. They also make use of the Standard of Living Index to automatically adjust the reward points for recognition as per the standard of living in a recipient’s country, ensuring users get equivalent points to redeem for rewards.
Integrations
HRIS
Integrations with human resources information systems (HRIS) let Vantage Circle sync with your HR platform to keep your users and their data up to date. They have a couple pre-built integrations with major HRIS platforms such as Zoho and SAP, as well as a couple lesser-known HRIS with a stronger presence in APAC regions. All other HRIS integrations will require a custom setup where your HRIS will periodically transfer your user list to Vantage Circle, if compatible.
SSO
Vantage Circle has pre-built single sign on (SSO) integrations with a few major SSO providers like Okta and Azure, which allow users to sign into the program using the same login credentials used for other business apps.
Common Tool Integrations
Vantage Circle integrates with the big three major business communication tools: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Facebook Workplace. This allows users to give and see recognition from within the tools they already use. There is also an integration with the less common Yammer.
Additional Integrations
Can connect to wearable fitness trackers as part of the Vantage Fit suite of features.
Analytics & Reporting
Vantage Circle’s insights dashboard allows you to view data and data visualizations pertaining to your recognition program across several areas including feed activity, recognition breakdowns, and budget summaries. However, there is a lack of default exportable reports that you can import into something like Excel for further analysis. And the data insights that you can export are limited to PDFs.
Support
Vantage Circle’s support is primarily reached through email or chat, but accounts also have a dedicated account manager they can reach out to with any questions or for strategic program consultation.
Their help center is fairly basic in both breadth and depth. Some help articles are accompanied by gifs, but they can be too small and fast to clearly see what’s going on. Other articles have no visual aids at all.
Additional Features
Vantage Perks
The Vantage Perks part of the platform offers corporate discounts for hundreds of top brands and has a cashback option that lets you earn back a percentage of what you spend as Vantage points. The deals are fairly generic and won’t necessarily be better than what you could find by shopping directly with the brand, but the ability to earn a percentage of what you spend as Vantage points gives a good incentive to take advantage of them.
Vantage points can also be earned by taking part in surveys and quizzes from brands that Vantage Circle promotes. Corporate discounts that your company has already negotiated can also be added to Perks. Perks also unlocks Vantage Classifieds, which allow users to buy and sell items to other users.
Vantage Pulse
Vantage Pulse lets you add surveys to your recognition program. Pulse comes with a set of predefined industry standard questions as well as the ability to create your own questions. All questions are are answered on a scale of 1-5.
Surveys are completely anonymous, but Pulse has a Conversation feature that allows admins to have an anonymous two-way conversation regarding any specific feedback.
Vantage Fit
Fit is a corporate wellness program that integrates with fitness trackers to create a gamified wellness experience. You can create fitness challenges with their own leaderboard, badges, and reward points. Fitness challenges can be made up of a good variety of tasks. Tasks like walking, running, and cycling can be tracked via the wearable trackers like Fitbit while those and other things like heart rate and squats can be detected by the Fit phone app. All other tasks like calorie tracking a water intake tracking are logged manually.
In a lot of ways Fit operates as a stand-alone product, having its own separate leaderboards, mobile app, social feed, and dashboard where you can view reports about activity levels, engagement levels, BMI levels, and a mental wellness summary at an organizational or demographic level.
Mobile Apps
Vantage Circle has apps for Android and Apple devices that allows users to use the Rewards, Perks, and Fit features on the go.
Additional Notes
- Recognition can be public, private (the recipient receives an email and it doesn’t post to the feed), or restricted (the posts are visible on the feed, but other users cannot view the recognition message).
- Can send company-wide or department-specific announcements that will appear in employees’ feeds. Can optionally choose to send email notifications to users as well.
- The default user roles are admins, managers, and normal users, but you can create custom roles with extensive, granular permission options.
- Users do not need an email. Employees can be registered on the platform with their employee ID and login with their employee ID and password.
- Admins and managers can delegate their appreciation, nomination, and/or approval rights to other users.
The Bottom Line
Each of the four products that make up the Vantage Circle platform can add a considerable set of features to your employee recognition program, but their utility will depend on how far you want to go beyond a core recognition program that is otherwise fairly standard.
