Oliver Bonas | Success Story

The challenge

Back in 2015, Oliver Bonas conducted an employee engagement survey to review its entire employee offering with the findings indicating that what was offered was, in fact, fair and competitive. However, it highlighted the company's main challenge – internally communicating an online offering to its 70% offline workforce who work in-store and in warehouses. Something many in the Retail industry struggle with.

Team members in these areas don’t have a work email address and they don’t have access to their own computer during working hours. Those working part-time are only in the business for a few days a week, too. This leads to them missing company updates from not always seeing their manager or being too busy serving customers during peak trading periods to check for themselves.

With this in mind, Oliver Bonas identified four key objectives:

Review what’s currently being offered to ensure competitiveness.
Create an engaging and creative communications strategy.
Increase traffic and uptake from all team members.
Ensure all communications reflect Oliver Bonas’ brand and culture.

The approach

Oliver Bonas quickly saw value in partnering with Reward Gateway to use an employee engagement platform which houses its existing offering alongside the addition of unbeatable employee discounts.

The platform has been completely customized to the Oliver Bonas brand and culture, and can be accessed on any device. Ideal for the offline demographic. With the platform in place, the Oliver Bonas team gathered support from management teams and encouraged them to be the front line promoters of the new offering. This included highlighting the enhancements of the new offering and instructions on how their teams can get registered.

To kick off its creative communications and add to the overall communications strategy, the team built momentum pre-launch with a series of custom-designed posters and emails – creating curiosity and excitement across the company. When the curiosity reached its peak, each store received specially-designed launch boxes. In the custom-designed boxes were party food, personalized letters, posters and an interactive “flapper” leaflet which displayed different images and messages when folded in different ways.

Each box brought a wave of joy to each store and set a tone of celebration. In the midst of this excitement, managers conveyed key information about the new offering, and the launch assets prompted employees to register and use the new offering while on their lunch breaks or while at home.

To maintain a buzz post-launch, clever competitions showcasing cartoons of the Oliver Bonas’ business owners, hidden on the new hub, prompted team members to write a paragraph about what they value the most about the new offering. Those who took part could win exclusive prizes from the company’s partners. Oliver Bonas has also been able to keep the offering engaging and current by being able to instantly update content and continually refresh the design and imagery used.

The results

Oliver Bonas saw an instant impact on how team members viewed their offering and, importantly, how the offering made them feel. A steady increase in platform registrations and anecdotal feedback added to the overall impact. This was proven with the usage results and also from the incredible feedback which employees anecdotally passed on throughout the competition.

With Oliver Bonas’ offering keeping everything in one, easy to access place and their new approach to communication, it saw:

20% increase in team members surveyed agreeing they understand and engage with their employee discounts offering – only six weeks after launch.
78% of team members are now active users with a noted increase from their offline demographic.
65% increase in traffic to the offering and a 44% increase in savings made through employee discounts.

Discounts are now even more critical to the Oliver Bonas brand, with thorough discussions on the new offering during the interview and onboarding stage, a new discounts page on the recruitment portion of the Oliver Bonas website, and even one-to-one training on how to use the platform with new starters.

Retailer uses creative communications to creatively increase usage and savings for a largely offline workforce

Summary

The challenge

The approach

The results

20%

78%

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