In 2011,
Vantiv was a recently spun-off technology firm in the business of processing credit and debit card payments for banks and retailers. As part of the process of moving from a division of a bank into its own company, the leadership of the Symmes Township, OH-based company decided that it needed an employee recognition program, both to motivate the staff and to help establish the new firm’s core values.
Three years later, Vantiv’s Values in Practice (VIP) program has morphed from a simple peer recognition program with e-cards and service anniversaries into a broad-based employee loyalty program that incorporates in-house and channel incentive sales programs, as well as a fast-growing customer conference. This has not only strengthened the company culture that VIP was established to create, but has also contributed to a three-year compound annual growth rate of 30 percent (technically to pro forma adjusted net income), enough to place Vantiv at No. 20 on the Forbes 2013 list of “America’s 100 Fastest Growing Tech Companies.”
“We attribute part of that growth to the effectiveness of these programs,” says Lynn Rhoads, senior vice president, communications, of NYSE-listed Vantiv, who runs VIP.
“When we first started out, I don’t think we envisioned it being as robust and as enterprise-wide as it has become,” Rhoads adds. “At the time, we were knee-deep in starting our own company and building our new brand, but that really allowed us, as we broke away from Fifth Third Bank, to look at and listen to our employees. We thought coming up with an employee recognition plan and tying that to our core values — to take action, to take ownership, to do the right thing, and to engage in teamwork — would create the organizational culture that we wanted to start to create, as our own separate company, with our own separate identity.”
Starting With Cheers
While the name Vantiv is new, the company’s history dates back more than 40 years, and Rhoads had been working with Vantiv’s New Brunswick, NJ-based engagement and incentive firm, Dittman Incentive Marketing, on sales incentive trips since the mid-2000s. “They always asked, ‘Have you looked at how you are tying this into employee engagement?’” Rhoads recalls.
“Dittman is a certified engagement agency, meaning that we help our clients on multiple pressure points along the way to engage not only their employees, but their customers and their business partners, making sure that they understand what the value proposition is,” says David Dittman, the firm’s executive vice president.
In Vantiv’s case, this started with Cheers for Peers, which allows employees to send each other interactive digital thank-you cards, and a service anniversary program that recognizes and rewards employees for every year of service. The rewards are points that can be redeemed from a catalog of merchandise, gift cards, individual travel awards, and experiential awards like concert and sporting event tickets. This points-based system remains at the heart of Vantiv’s various recognition and rewards programs. Over
the course of three years, 60 percent of the Vantiv workforce has been recognized.
After setting up the initial programs, “we then said we want to go further, we want to catch and celebrate employees who are doing something right, going above and beyond what they do every day for customers or internal customers — team members,” Rhoads says. “So we introduced the Living Our Values nominating process. Employees can go in and nominate a peer for demonstrating a value.” The employee and her manager are notified, and the submissions go through an approval process, after which the employee can be awarded points and be recognized on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, Rhoads says.
Another program that one of Vantiv’s lines recently started is called Ace in the Hole, which gives managers a quarterly points budget for actions that uphold the company’s values. “We’re hoping to roll that out company-wide in 2014,” Rhoads says.
An Expansive Salesforce
One of the most directly lucrative parts of Vantiv’s umbrella of engagement programs is Vantiv Referral Rewards, a channel program open to external partners, customers, and internal employees.
“We’re a financial payments processing company, so our customers are merchants and financial institutions,” Rhoads explains. “We wanted to incent our employees — you go do your dry cleaning, you eat out, you have your [school] affiliations, who does their payment processing? Our employees interact with potential customers every day, so we tied in a referral campaign module to that Values in Practice program.”
The same thing applies to the thousands of financial institutions and tens of thousands of merchants for whom Vantiv processes payments. “We actually have a referral program for them, to reward their employees,” Rhoads says. “It works the same way, with points, but our customers refer their customers. We’re seeing some tremendous growth.”
Generating between 100 and 200 referrals a month, the Merchant Referral Program brought in more than 1,200 referrals in a little less than a year. Vantiv estimates the lifetime profit value of the resulting business to be $3.3 million. Given that slightly more than $100,000 was spent on it, that’s a staggering 32-to-1 return on investment.
Those points, and the catalog that backs them up, are a key to the program’s success, Rhoads believes. “I absolutely believe that non-cash awards are more effective than cash,” she says, noting that the catalog of awards includes everything from a Vantiv-branded prepaid MasterCard, to merchandise such as jewelry, grills, and golf clubs, to individual travel awards.
“We’re seeing a significant trend of [points-earners] accumulating points [over time] for larger merchandise items,” Rhoads says. “Cash is great, but I think people do like the fact that they can pick out something that they wouldn’t have bought for themselves. They get really excited that they can redeem for it. So it is actually moving the needle.”
Of course, the company has a traditional annual incentive sales trip — Vantiv’s Circle of Excellence. It’s a tough nut to crack, requiring salespeople to hit 125 percent of their quota. But for the roughly 60 salespeople and 15 managers and senior executives who make it annually, it is an unforgettable experience.
In 2013, the Circle of Excellence qualifiers went to the Westin Seven Mile Beach resort in Grand Cayman, enjoying fine dining, spa treatments, snorkeling, and networking with senior leaders. It was an experience that led 83 percent of participants to say on the post-trip survey that it had a “strong” or “very strong” impact in terms of inspiring them to hit their goals. That impact was not limited to just salespeople.
“What some of our lines of business do is look at those [Living Our Values] nominations as well,” Rhoads says. “The sales guy is great, but he’s only the feet on the street. Then, it’s those folks in the back office who are getting it done. So, they’ll look at those nominations and say, ‘You’re the employee of the year, we’re taking you on the trip.’ That’s another great way to take an employee who’s in a support role and really recognize them.”