Perkbox
Perkbox is the UK's leading employee and customer engagement provider.
- Location
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London,
United Kingdom
Categories: SaaS/PaaS Digital Mixed B2B/B2C
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Investment
sought: - £1,500,008
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Equity
offered: - 1.95%
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Investment
amount: - £4,353,745
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Valuation
(pre-money): - £75,436,223
Idea
Introduction
In the UK, just 39% of employees are engaged and only 28% of consumers are loyal to their providers. Perkbox is the UK’s leading employee and customer engagement platform.
‘Perkbox for employees’ helps to boost financial, emotional and physical wellbeing by providing:
- On-the-go-access to over 200 perks, including free phone insurance and 2 for 1 meals out
- An online rewards & recognition system that encourages managers to reward employees with physical rewards and teammates to recognise each other by exchanging digital badges
- A Wellness Hub: a collection of professionally-made cooking/exercise videos and a free 24/7 employee assistance helpline to boost wellbeing and reduce sick days
‘Perkbox for customers’ is an advanced customer loyalty programme that helps businesses to acquire, engage and retain a loyal customer base. Our programmes are white labelled, extending customer branding across the whole customer experience.
Our biggest customers include Deliveroo, BUPA, British Gas and Worldpay.
Intended impact
Perkbox’s mission is to help businesses to connect and engage with the audiences most important to them.
The ‘Perkbox for employees’ business model is based on the often undervalued correlation between employee happiness and business success. Happy employees are 12% more productive, take 37% fewer sick days and are 87% less likely to leave an organisation.
Our product was born out of the philosophy that every business should have access to the best perks. In other words, we aim to ‘democratise’ benefits, helping managers from SMEs through to large corporates to foster an environment in which staff feel valued, engaged and committed.
‘Perkbox for customers’ provides clients looking to build stronger connections between their brand and their customers with a bespoke loyalty solution in the form of a branded, cross-channel platform. Our dynamic smart provisioning, go-to-market account management and detailed customer analytics help to engage customers at all stages in the lifecycle.
Substantial accomplishments to date
Since the launch of Perkbox we have:
• Received external investment and backing from:
- Alex Chesterman: Founder and CEO – Zoopla Property Group PLC & Co-founder - LoveFiLM
- Andy Phillipps: Founder & CEO – ActiveHotels & Chairman – Reevoo
- Sherry Coutu CBE: Founded Interactive Investor, board advisor of LinkedIn, Top10 most influential investors by Wired magazine
- Simon Murdoch: Former VP of Amazon Europe reporting to Jeff Bezos, founded and now runs VC fund Episode 1
- Sean Park: Early investor in BetFair, runs Anthemis – financial Advisory and VC firm
- Udayan Goyal: Ex-MD of Tech Banking at Deutsche Bank, runs Apis Partners – investing in financial services investments in emerging markets
- Simon Franks - Co-Founder at LOVEFiLM
- Jason Pellegrino - MD, Google Australia and New Zealand
• Quintupled our headcount in 18 months, building a team of more than 100 talented and driven employees
• Acquired over 300K subscribers
• Increased our annual revenue by 3.5x from 2014 to 2015 (from £ 1.23 mil to £ 4.32 mil) and in the first six months of 2016 our revenue was already larger than in all of 2015 (£ 4.92 mil vs £ 4.32 mil).* This was all off the back of very little initial external investment
• Been ranked no. 2 in the Startups 100 index of the most innovative and fastest growing startups in the UK
*source: unaudited management accounts
• Won, and been shortlisted for, a number of HR & Customer Loyalty awards, including:
- Finalist - 2016 Amazon Growing Business Awards ‘Growing Business of the Year’
- Winner - 2016 Workplace Savings & Benefits ‘Benefits Provider of the Year’
- Winner (w/ Worldpay) - 2016 Card & Payments Awards ‘Best Benefits or Loyalty Programme of the Year’
- Winner (Highly Commended) - 2016 Reward Guide VIB Awards ‘Best Product for Making Pay Go Further’
- Finalist (w/ Snowflake Gelato) - 2016 HR Excellence Awards
- Finalist - 2016 Personnel Today Awards ‘Best Employee Benefits’
• Generated significant positive publicity, including coverage in the Financial Times and Sunday Times
Our customers have given us over 320 5 star reviews on Facebook, labelling our level of service as ‘excellent’, and we have received 90% positive feedback on Feefo.
Monetisation strategy
Perkbox is based on a subscription model. We are paid a monthly/annual license fee by an employer who wishes to offer Perkbox to his/her team of employees, or a brand looking to add Perkbox to its business proposition as a value-added product.
Packages are tailored to the needs and desires of individual clients and the price of the Perkbox platform varies depending on the size of the business and the perks they are looking to include.
Our smart engagement technology, which includes an online savings assistant and an automated personalised user journey, is designed to provide customers and employees with a tailored Perkbox experience, ensuring that each individual user receives offers that are relevant to them. We are proud to offer a platform that regularly generates at least 70% engagement. This is defined by measuring the number of customers actually redeeming benefits, rather than by looking at number of logins (as is the industry’s customary measure of engagement).
Use of proceeds
We are raising additional capital to expand our product portfolio, increase resourcing in development, marketing and account management and enhance the smart technology that allows us to identify and communicate pertinent content to leads and to our user-base. The investments we are making today aim to ensure scalability, a lower cost of acquisition and improved customer experience resulting in higher customer lifetime values. We are paving the way for expansion in other verticals, including reward and recognition, wellness, L&D and others.
However, we are not just offering the crowd the opportunity to be a part of our future financial success. We are a mission-led business and are opening the Perkbox doors to investors who would like to join us in creating a better work culture across the UK. We hope that as part of our community you will share in our success but will also spread the word about the importance of employee engagement and customer loyalty in the modern marketplace.
Shareholder perks
We are also offering anyone joining our journey with an investment of more than £1,000 a free lifetime Perkbox account.
This will give you access to all of our exclusive perks and benefits and wellness hub. You will be included in our communications, if you wish, and will become a truly integrated member of the Perkbox community.
Market
Target market
The customer rewards market spend in 2015 was $17.6 billion worldwide.
The HR/Human Capital Management (HCM) market is forecast to grow from $12.59 billion in 2016 to $19.88 billion by 2021.
This means that Perkbox customer and employee engagement platforms are faced with a worldwide market opportunity of more than $30 billion.
Characteristics of target market
'Perkbox for employees'
With regards to employee engagement, the number of employees in the UK is 25.8 million, of which 15.6 million work for companies with fewer than 250 employees.
We believe our peers in the UK employee engagement and HR Tech / HCM space focus on companies with teams of over 1000. Given that there are only 6965 companies with more than 250 employees in the UK, most employee engagement companies are consequently targeting a very concentrated market. In contrast, Perkbox aims to service the vast majority of both businesses and employees.
While the product is suitable and easily-integrated into any industry, Perkbox has seen considerable success in retail/hospitality, healthcare, care homes, recruitment agencies, education companies and umbrella companies. We also see particular interest from, and success in, companies that operate in multiple locations.
'Perkbox for customers'
With regards to customer engagement, Perkbox focuses on large businesses with a significant customer base (typically over 25,000 customers when the target company is B2B and 50,000 customers in a B2C environment). The customer loyalty offering also generates a valuable ROI with companies in any industry.
Marketing strategy
The Perkbox marketing team are very experienced across multiple disciplines.
Our acquisition strategy is based on leveraging the latest technologies to help us identify, educate, acquire and nurture our leads through to point of sale. We test constantly, learn quickly from mistakes and capitalise on opportunities.
We use both digital channels and offline channels, including PR, SEO, PPC, social media, affiliates, email marketing, display, events, TV and radio. Our PR and content strategies - whitepapers, blog posts, keynote presentations at large HR and vertical events and webinars - help to boost our reputation and position ourselves as thought leaders in the industry. Nonetheless, it is word of mouth sales via referrals that we are most excited and proud of.
The versatility and agility of our product allows us to target businesses of all sizes, from sole traders to corporates. Our marketing engine is tuned to acquire leads effectively and our growing sales team is structured for scale and high conversion to sale. Our teams operate as one single seamless unit that focuses on growth and delivering on our promise to our users.
'Perkbox Live', our monthly event, is an opportunity to bring our brand to life by gathering like-minded individuals, great speakers and the Perkbox community. The media buzz, socialising and post-event marketing collateral helps to increase our profile.
A key differentiator is that we apply very successful B2C marketing and branding techniques in a B2B environment, creating opportunities and growth that we believe have not been seen in the B2B space before.
Our engagement strategy further helps us to place our proposition above the competition. Our emails and comms are tailored to the needs of each user segment to ensure that are customers are delighted and engaged everyday. From our experience many employee benefits schemes incite very low levels of engagement. We typically generate a minimum of 70% engagement.
Competition strategy
Perkbox has a simple, clear proposition that targets businesses of all sizes, including SMEs for whom traditional employee engagement solutions are typically unaffordable and inaccessible.
As we develop our product portfolio, we are placing an increasing focus on multi-location and non-office-based businesses. We take a holistic approach to engagement, focusing not only on providing our customers with a variety of financial savings, but also looking to enhance the physical and emotional wellbeing of the team through our Wellness Hub and Rewards and Recognition system. We have so far avoided ‘cashback deals’, instead focusing on deep discount, self-negotiated partnerships that drive deeper levels of engagement with employees and customers. We provide a fully account managed service and our smart engagement technology tracks behaviour and interests and communicates relevant, timely and personalised content to users accordingly. Our Online Savings Assistant is a Google Chrome plugin that alerts customers in real time if they are entitled to a better offer or reward when searching on Google via the Perkbox platform, providing instant surprise and delight.
The traditional way of measuring and reporting on engagement levels in the employee and customer engagement industries is through login statistics. At Perkbox, we go further, focusing on measuring perk redemptions and user activity on the platform in order to drive deeper engagement.