How to leverage corporate offers as employee benefits

The corporate deals offered by numerous brands can be included in the employee benefits plan, making the staff feel proud of being part of the organisation.

In a string of lucrative offers that various products or services come out with, in order to lure their customers, the one that seems to always stand out is most often a corporate discount. While consumer or luxury brands and other businesses offer these special deals for corporate employees to increase their sales, one may wonder what’s in it for employers.

Well, if channelised well by the employers, these corporate deals offered by numerous brands can become a significant part of an employee benefits plan. This, in turn, makes employees feel proud of being part of an organisation that helps them provide specialised access to various products and services, along with enabling huge financial savings, which they will otherwise be unable to gain.

Additionally, a structured plan and a platform that bring together all such corporate deals, also prevent the employers from having to undergo the struggle of meeting and negotiating with individual brands and on-boarding them as corporate partners. How do organisations really achieve this?

Consider this. An Indian IT services company with over one lakh employees, was in need of a structured way of looking at corporate offers, as it was taking up a lot of the strategic mindspace of its HR and administrative teams. Due to the sheer size of the company, in terms of the headcount, various brands used to approach it with offers of special pricing for different products and services, for their employees.

The company foresaw how employees will end up saving a lot if they receive the employee discounts from these brands, and how it will be seen as a great corporate benefit. However, the process of negotiating with each of these brands and to finally get them on-boarded as corporate partners was tedious and time taking. Once on-boarded, it was difficult for HR to manage employee support issues and regular communication about new or existing deals, with the employees.

 Vantage Circle’s employee discount platform gives employees access to deals that are exclusively for corporate employees to avail from a variety of categories like health, travel, apparels, real estate etc.

 As a solution to this challenge, the company partnered with Vantage Circle, which created a specially-branded web and mobile platform for this IT company. Employees were able to log in and access special employee pricing on products and services, on Vantage Circle Corporate Offers. The platform became a one-stop shop with more than 150 brands providing exclusive offers across categories, such as dining, travel, automobile, insurance, electronics, apparels, and so on.

All of this was put in one place for the employees to avail whenever and wherever needed. This made the access easy and thereby improved employee experience. In addition, Vantage Circle was responsible for all communication to employees and managing support issues, leaving the HR team to focus on related strategic aspects, such as impact, employee experience and engagement. Even the individual brands who approached the company, were passed on to Vantage Circle from thereon, to evaluate and get listed on the platform.

As a result, while it saved the employers a huge hassle, the ‘spend to save’ ratio of employees improved remarkably, leaving them with increased financial gain. On an average, employees now spend more than two crores per month through the platform, with savings of over Rs 10 lakhs a month. In fact, a survey which aimed to find out the usefulness of the platform, also revealed that more than 95 per cent of employees said they will recommend this platform to their colleagues and above 82 per cent shared that this platform made them take pride in the fact that their company provides them such a platform.