Tri Source International saves hours sending high-volume employee spot bonuses
“I can't even tell you the amount of time that was spent sending employee bonuses before. With Tremendous, we're truly talking hours of savings."
Highlights
Tri Source International is a global outsourcing company with customer experience agents based in North and South America.
The company keeps its workforce engaged with spot bonuses and other recognition gifts throughout the year.
With Tremendous, its team is able to send rewards faster, reduce administrative friction, and provide a great employee experience.
Challenge
Tri Source International (TSI) is an international outsourcing company with call center agents in the United States, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Its employees provide customer support for a wide range of global consumer and B2B companies.
To combat turnover and keep its lower-wage workforce engaged, TSI runs a robust spot bonus and employee recognition program. From small post-call bonuses to larger performance-based payouts to annual employee awards, TSI sends out thousands of rewards a year.
Employees love the bonus program — but for Senior Controller and Analytics Director Charles Kalyn and the TSI HR team, managing rewards used to be a time-consuming and painful administrative process.
“In Mexico, we'd buy stacks of gift cards, usually about 100 at a time, and we’d receive digital codes. Then we’d email the digital code to the employee that was utilizing it. And every single one of them had to be an individual email sent out by our HR department,” says Charles. “We created a Google sheet that had all the code numbers, and you would put in who you issued the code to and the date.”
The team would follow a similar process in the US, except they would purchase physical gift cards from a local store and hand them out onsite.
This manual process would take TSI hours to complete for a single batch of bonuses. And managing codes in spreadsheets increased the risk of potential errors and security issues.
“I only let three employees in Mexico have access to that sheet because if somebody got access to it, they could just immediately download all these gift cards,” says Charles. “And when we sent them out to an employee, there was no way to recover a code or confirm the employee received it — anything of that nature. It was kind of just a spray and pray.”
Solution
In 2023, Charles decided to look for a reward program vendor that could streamline his team’s operations. That's when he found Tremendous.
“Everybody else we talked to wanted to know how much we would spend on rewards, and they wanted money upfront to set up a portal. There was no way I was going to get that approved. When I learned that there is no upfront cost to us with Tremendous — our cost is whatever we spend — this was a huge selling point and an easy sale to our COO and CEO,” says Charles.
Once TSI signed up with Tremendous, the team was able to start sending out bonuses quickly — just a few weeks after their first demo meeting.
“It was a really easy process. I built a four-man team and had everything ready to build, and I was able to onboard the platform with one other associate who made sure I did all the things I needed to do on my end,” says Charles. “We were able to send our first Rockstar batch of bonuses a week after we signed up, and were full force in under a month.”
Tremendous benefits for TSI
Time savings
One of the biggest benefits TSI has experienced with Tremendous is time savings. Not only was the team able to get up and running quickly — they’re also saving hours on every employee bonus payout.
“The time management benefit — not having to send individual emails — is huge,” says Charles. “I can't even tell you the amount of time that was spent when we had a 40-person Teammate of the Month award and we had to send 40 unique emails to 40 different people. We used to copy and paste codes from a spreadsheet to an email, then copy who we're sending that code to back to the spreadsheet. We're truly talking hours of time savings.”
In addition to saving its HR team time, Tremendous also sped up when employees get bonuses in their inboxes.
“One of the biggest complaints I had from employees is that it was typically a 72-hour turnaround before they got their spot bonus,” says Charles. “Before, someone would send me an email that a person was getting a spot bonus. I confirmed it was within their budget and sent it over to HR. Then HR would get the email drafted to the employee, and the employee would check their email three days later and see their bonus. Now, when someone sends a spot bonus email to me, usually the person gets it within two hours. It really sped up the time from acknowledgement to receipt of award.”
Simplified tracking and reporting
When TSI used Google Sheets to track bonuses, reporting on earnings at an employee level was cumbersome, especially for US-based staff.
“HR was getting very frustrated sending out gift cards because each one required individual tracking,” says Charles. “On the US side, I have to track how much money I'm giving the employees to see if I’m getting near the tax threshold on whether something is a true bonus or still a spot bonus. I had no way of tracking it easily, so once again, we went to a Google Sheet.”
With Tremendous, Charles and TSI’s HR team can easily pull reports on how many rewards each employee has gotten, which rewards have been deemed, and the total dollar amount paid to individual team members in a given calendar year, simplifying their reporting process.
Instant, personalized rewards
Spot bonuses aren’t just a nice-to-have benefit. For TSI, it’s a core part of the company’s employee recognition and retention strategy.
“The market out there has very quick turnover for low-wage employees. Spot bonuses are huge because they give employees that feeling that people care,” says Charles. “A pizza party for a lot of people is a slap in the face because employees think, who cares. But when an executive walks up and gives them a spot bonus after a great call, they feel like they were recognized for doing a good job. People get really excited when our team shows up onsite because they know that there's some money on the table, and usually they're working a little bit harder that day.”
With Tremendous, rewards land in people’s inboxes shortly after they receive verbal praise for their work, reinforcing the company’s appreciation with coordinated monetary and social recognition.
Tremendous also provides employees with flexible reward options. For some bonuses, TSI gives US recipients their choice of gift card instead of getting money toward a single vendor.
“It’s nice to let employees have a choice in what reward they get instead of whatever our operations manager grabs at the nearby market,” says Charles.
Multi-program support
While spot bonuses are the primary employee recognition program at TSI, the company has also been able to support other types of rewards programs throughout the year like ad hoc gift cards and annual awards.
“We have a lot of remote employees, so when we had a Meetings of the Mind session, our CEO wanted to feed everybody lunch. Instead of trying to figure out how to get everybody's Uber Eats orders over to the executive assistant, we just sent out a $50 Uber Eats gift card to everybody and said, have lunch delivered so we can eat and have a conversation. It was really simple to do something like that with Tremendous versus having to place individual orders on our Uber account.”
Customer Service Week is an important annual celebration for TSI. Over the course of the week, Charles and his team are on point to send out several different rewards to recognize employees for their contributions.
“We gave awards where everybody voted on who had a positive attitude, and the winners could choose between all these different awards — whatever they wanted. We did a raffle where every time someone won a game, they got a raffle ticket to win a larger prize,” says Charles. “It made it really fun for people. And it was really easy to manage the budget on my part. What did we spend, how much did we send out — all that was tracked very easily in Tremendous."
Impact
Since switching to Tremendous, TSI has been able to send out a high volume of employee bonuses and other rewards with less time, hassle, and risk. And its employees are excited to receive bonuses immediately after they have noteworthy wins at work.
$2.1 million in employee rewards sent since 2023
Hours saved per bonus payout
Reduced manual administrative work
Improved employee experience with instant reward delivery
“It was really easy to manage the budget on my part. What did we spend, how much did we send out — all that was tracked very easily in Tremendous.”
Outsourcing
1000+
US, Mexico
Pay Pal, Gift Cards