Signet Jewellers
Signet Jewellers Limited is best known for its high street retail brands including H.Samuel, Leslie Davis and Ernest Jones. When shopping around for a Voluntary Benefits provider early on in 2009, Signet were not just looking for an employee discount provider - they wanted someone who could give their HR function an identity. Asperity proved to be the perfect partner!
Asperity have helped Signet to extract maximum value out of its Reward Gateway platform enabling them to showcase not only Asperity provided benefits but their own benefit information too.
Centralising benefits
At the time of launch, there was no central place for Signet employees to find information on all of their benefits. So additional tabs were built in to Reward Gateway allowing Signet to provide information on its own corporate benefits such as life assurance, company car allowances and study aid provisions.
It wasn’t just information that was displayed. Asperity also developed some time saving tools for the HR Team. Any retail business will sympathise with the forever asked question ”How much holiday do I have” and this was true for Signet too. However, Asperity was able to create a Holiday Calculator for Signet to sit on Reward Gateway. The result is that queries to the office have dropped saving them time, while registrations on Reward Gateway have increased - Win:Win!
Offline communications
Having a great benefits site is one thing, but for it to be fantastic, people have to know about it and use it. With a predominantly offline workforce in over 550 retail locations across the UK, communication was always going to be a challenge. Employee discounts were new to Signet, so the first task was to create interest, excitement and ultimately engagement. This would require a communications campaign designed to reach each and every employee and the foundation for this was the quarterly newsletter. The impact of this first piece of comms had a real positive impact on registration numbers and continues to do so with registrations increasing by around 30% after each posting.
Recognising word-of-mouth
The power of ‘recommendations’ should never be underestimated so Signet and Asperity together saw an opportunity to capitalise on this by introducing ‘Tell Mel!’ Signet employee, Melanie, was already an avid fan of Reward Gateway and her savings were soon featured in communications. Other employees were encouraged to share their stories with the incentive to win prizes if their story was featured in the Newsletter. The “Tell Mel’ section has proved to be a really valuable tool bringing credibility when showing the type and level of savings available.
What's next?
And it doesn’t stop there, Asperity took over as Signet’s Childcare Voucher provider from January 2011. This is integrated into the heart of the Reward Gateway platform, bringing along improvements such as double the normal rate of discount at a selection of child related retailers and seven day per week Helpdesk!
