PerkSpot

The school year is almost here! Parents are making sure their kids have the school supplies they’ll need for the coming year. PerkSpot provides discounts on backpacks, computers, and school clothes at the retailers your employees shop.

Save 10% on nearly everything at Target.com. From the must-have backpack to the ever-important first-day outfit, Target brings the season’s most coveted products for the classroom and dorm room together in one place.

Save up to 12% on computers and electronics with the Dell Employee Purchase Program. Receive maximum savings when you couple a computer purchase with other electronics and a service plan.

Save 10% on all orders from eBags plus receive free shipping on orders over $35.

Human Resources administrators can simplify and enhance their employee discount program with PerkSpot. Offer your employees a voluntary benefit package that they can use in their everyday lives.

For human resource managers and administrators, major holidays can be incredibly busy. Along with the normal day-to-day business that must be conducted during these times, both local and national merchants are eager to advertise and expose their product specials and discounts to employees during these times. This influx of requests can add to an already heavy workload, and this is where PerkSpot can help. PerkSpot can relieve this burden while customizing an employee discount program for employees. Allowing PerkSpot to manage the employee discount program can allow an organization to take full advantage of any and all company discounts that are offered to your employees. PerkSpot will manage these merchant relationships, keep the program and service up-to-date, and handle customer service inquiries. And, in the end, the organization wins by providing their employees with an extra perk!

Summer is officially here around the country, and as employees start to plan their vacations and children are out of school, PerkSpot has procured some great ideas and discounts to help plan some family fun. These summertime discounts are just one example of the many discounts and voluntary benefits that PerkSpot can bring to an employee discount program. In fact, PerkSpot works with human resources departments to create programs from scratch or enhance and customize existing programs. Perks and voluntary benefits that PerkSpot can bring to your company have been and will continue to be an easy and cost-effective tool for human resources departments to successfully manage their human capital. And, you can use the discounts when you plan your corporate or department outings! Here’s a sampling of our summertime discounts:

Tickets are available for all of the Walt Disney World® Resort Theme Parks which include Disney’s Magic Kingdom® Theme Park, Epcot® Park, Disney-MGM Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom® Theme Park, as well as the Disney Water Parks, Downtown Disney® Pleasure Island, Cirque Du Soleil® and much more!

With theme parks across the country, you’re always just a hop, skip, and turbo drop from the endless thrills of Six Flags.

Save $15 off tickets to watch your favorite Major League Baseball teams play!

Save $15 off tickets to watch your favorite NFL teams play!

When it comes to employee discounts, deals and voluntary benefits, PerkSpot caters to the whole family. Pet insurance is an increasingly popular and affordable voluntary benefit that can keep your furry friends healthy and happy. A study by The Freedonia Group, Inc. estimates that U.S. spending on veterinary care, laboratory testing and pet insurance will increase 7.1% a year to $28.9 billion in 2011. At the retail level alone, pet owners in the U.S. are expected to spend over $10 billion on pet health products.

PerkSpot offers discounted policies with VPI Pet Insurance as part of its employee discount programs and voluntary benefits packages. As the nation’s oldest and largest provider of pet health insurance, VPI offers coverage for diagnostic tests, treatments, office visits, lab fees, prescriptions, hospitalization, x-rays and surgical procedures. You can visit any licensed veterinarian, even when you are away from home. Whether you own a dog, cat, reptile or other exotic animal, insurance is the best way to provide your pet with a longer, healthier lifespan.

America’s current economic downturn is causing many employees to reevaluate their spending habits. Employees are looking to their voluntary benefit options to help save income on necessary purchases. According to a recent article from Voluntary.com about voluntary benefits, Bob Reiff, Senior Vice President for The Hartford’s Group Benefits Division states that: “We are predicting enrollment events to double from last year to this year. But it could be even greater, since we’ve already seen enrollment activities jump 51% from first quarter 2007 to the first quarter of 2008.”

PerkSpot helps corporations meet employee demand for voluntary benefit packages and enrollment education. PerkSpot creates voluntary programs that bring employees savings on necessary services like home and auto insurance, pet insurance and legal services. PerkSpot’s comprehensive voluntary programs easily fit into employer benefits communication materials and benefit enrollment events. This meets the demand and gives employees the opportunity to take advantage of their savings opportunities immediately.

In today’s economy, it is increasingly important for human resource professionals to help employees achieve financial stability through benefit options. Voluntary benefits like group home and auto insurance and legal insurance are important perks that can help ease employee financial burden. According to the 2007 MetLife Study of Employee Benefit Trends:

The value of voluntary benefits to employees — flexibility, convenient payment through payroll deduction, quality vendors, and better group rates — may offset any potential concerns they may have about paying most or all of the costs.

PerkSpot helps human resource departments meet the financial needs of their employees. PerkSpot creates a customized discount program for each client that includes group home and auto insurance, pet insurance, and legal insurance. PerkSpot obtains even deeper discounts on these services when the employee uses the payroll deduction option. Giving employees various perks and new options for voluntary benefits can help them achieve financial success.

As an employee discount program provider, PerkSpot seeks to offer human resource professionals a wide array of discounts on popular goods and services in addition to traditional voluntary benefits like group home and auto insurance. As a voluntary benefit, employees are not obligated to participate, and PerkSpot can provide them with access to attractive rates despite what has traditionally been available in the past. Is this a benefit you are currently offering to your employees?

PerkSpot can help hr professionals think through the voluntary benefits that could be available to your employees. From our experience, this is a corporate perk that is increasingly important to offer employees in order to stay competitive with today’s benefits offerings.

We’d like to share an idea that many of our clients have used to reward and recognize their employees. Human resource professionals are often tasked with the strategy and execution of any employee recognition efforts, and we have noticed that many of our corporate clients have started to use PerkSpot discounts for this purpose. While PerkSpot is primarily an employee discount program, human resource administrators are using deep discounts on movie tickets, restaurant gift certificates, and movie rentals as their means of recognizing their employees. A common discount we have seen used for this purpose is our AMC Theatres discount.

AMC Theatre pre-paid tickets are offered at a savings of up to 35% off the regular box office price and can be used at any of the chain’s locations for any show, 7 days a week.

How do you recognize and reward your employees?

Whoever is in charge of managing an organization’s employee discount program, one of their largest responsibilities is typically fielding calls and solicitation from merchants and vendors wanting to offer a discount. These discounts represent a wide range of goods and services: a national health club chain and their wellness programs, a local ice cream shop, a regional homebuilder, an online handbag retailer, etc. Thinking about the sheer number of merchants who call and then require a response can make one’s head spin. In addition, companies whose employees highly utilize the employee discount program will often refer merchants and ask the human resource administrators to contact the merchants!

PerkSpot has the ability to adopt these employee discount programs and the associated management of merchant discounts. Furthermore, PerkSpot clients are actively encouraged to refer any inquiries to PerkSpot so discounts obtained and communicated as quickly as possible. Taking this burden off an administrator’s hands often frees up much needed time which can now be devoted to core job responsibilities, and PerkSpot’s expertise in merchant management enhances the value of the program in the first place.

PerkSpot is constantly looking for new merchants to participate in the employee discount programs that it manages. An important component to adding merchants is based on feedback and suggestions from users. In a given month, approximately one employee per thousand will suggest a merchant to be added to his or her respective discount program. For an employer with 10,000 employees, that’s two merchants per week. Realistically, the time required for a human resource administrator to bring a merchant onto their existing employee discount program is somewhere between 2-3 hours. That’s an average of 2 -3, 8-hour workdays every month!

PerkSpot helps fulfill a recently developed void for companies and their talent management strategies: restoring the employer-employee bond. Previously, employers proposed ‘if you are a reliable worker, I will guarantee you a job and benefits for the life of the company’ and employees responded ‘I am grateful for this job and will work hard for you until I retire.’ Outsourcing, the dot com era, the exodus of baby boomers from the workforce, spectacular company failures and corporate scandals have all contributed to the dissolution of this bond. As all industries must do, human resources departments and talent management strategies must evolve to survive and potentially capitalize on these trends.

To deal with these larger problems and changes, companies have discovered new ways to build employee loyalty. Further proving this underlying change, an entirely new industry has emerged that caters to building a strategy around recruiting, developing, and retaining employees. PerkSpot was created to help fulfill this need by offering customized employee discount programs that serve as an added perk for company employees. PerkSpot can help showcase additional voluntary benefits that might just give a company that extra edge needed to achieve success in its employee relations. PerkSpot also gives human resource administrators more time to focus on their core job responsibilities by maintaining the employee discount program, managing merchant relationships, and marketing the program to company employees.