Boost Sales and Customer Loyalty with Transparent Incentive Management

Incentive programs are a useful tool for enterprises for encouraging continued business from customers, or even for acquiring new ones. There are many different methods to do this, including rebates, vouchers, and customer loyalty schemes. This also means that there is a lot of data to keep track of.

If customers feel they are getting good value from a product or service, they will keep coming back for more. Incentives play a vital role in achieving this by offering discounts or rewards. However, every product, service, and customer is different. This means companies are often running a wide range of incentive programs that are subject to change. As a result, incentive management presents many organizations with significant challenges. How can companies maintain a clear overview of incentive and sales programs as well as making decisions in real time?

Centralize Incentive Management for Transparency

Adopting a digital solution is key for incentive management in the modern business landscape. Competition for customers is fiercer than ever before, and more and more companies are introducing a wide range of complex programs to incentivize customers. So how can you manage this? There are various digital incentive management solutions available – some of which can be run within SAP. A key benefit of an incentive management solution is that you have all schemes in a single view that leverages your existing master data.

You are able to use different incentive management apps for different users. Managers can create new incentive programs and administrators can review items on hold, for example. Standard SAP solutions come without reporting functions. An incentive management module will often be able to provide detailed reports of all contracts and settlements. In this way, you achieve complete transparency over your incentive programs.

Keep Your Customers on Side

Ensuring your customers are continuously satisfied is the biggest way an incentive management solution adds value to your business. Knowing what your customers respond to is key to success. Users can view which programs are bringing in great results and which ones are lagging behind. As a result, you can make changes based on trends to make sure your customers are always enthusiastic about your products and services.

How Does a Solution Help You Incentivize Customers?

There are many ways of encouraging customers to buy your products. However, manually calculating and applying rebates is often time-consuming and there is always the chance of human error. With an incentive management solution, you are able to set predefined parameters. An example of this would be applying a percentage discount of sales volumes if certain thresholds are met. These rules are automatically and consistently applied to the transaction. Your customers see their rewards instantly and remain satisfied.

Turning a Negative Situation into a Positive One

Sometimes you end up with a situation where a customer isn’t happy or has a complaint. Using incentives, you can turn this situation on its head and actually strengthen customer relationships. You can provide compensation or future incentives to give your company another chance and even increase loyalty as a result. However, if you can’t act quickly, the opportunity for turning the situation into a positive diminishes. An incentive management solution enables you to instantly call up information such as eligibility and take timely action.

Keep on Top of Spending and Plan for the Future

Another challenge of incentive management is ensuring that all programs are operating within budget. If you cannot track all incentives from end to end, it is unlikely that you will know what your expenditure is. Using a solution for this, you can automate limits of programs to ensure you never stray outside your designated budget for discounts or payments. This makes you financially stable and enables you to confidently plan for the future.

Key Features of it.smart incentives

Regardless of what role incentives play in your daily business, it.smart incentives has your needs covered.

Features for distributors:

• Customer and vendor rebates
• Trade promotions
• Vendor chargebacks

Features for manufacturers:

• Customer rebates
• Trade promotions
• Customer billbacks

Features for companies with sales forces and brokers:

• Commissions

NTT DATA Business Solutions Can Assist Your Business with Incentive Management

NTT DATA Business Solutions works closely with businesses from a diverse range of sectors to overcome administrative challenges in the digital age. We developed the AddOn it.smart incentives that works with SAP software to streamline incentive management at your organization.

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