Since embarking on our journey to build easy-to-use employee rewards and recognition software for growing businesses, we’ve gotten all kinds of requests.

Our customers aren’t shy about asking for features to improve their experience, and prospects also let us know about functionality that would serve their program objectives. This feedback has helped inform our product roadmap. And it’s resulted in many improvements being developed over the last few years - whether new design, improved functionality, additional features, or apps and integrations with third-party applications.

In fact, early on many customers asked about an integration with Slack. So, we built a fairly basic webhook integration in 2019. It was good, but still required customers’ employees to toggle over to the Qarrot web application to perform most actions.

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Much has changed since that early Slack integration.

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Qarrot for Slack

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In 2023, we finally ditched the webhook integration for Slack! In its place, we’ve launched the Qarrot app for Slack. Find Qarrot in the Slack app directory.

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While customers can still connect the Qarrot social feed to a Slack channel, they can also install the Qarrot app. This permits their employees to open Qarrot in Slack and perform a number of actions, including seeing their points balance and sending recognitions.

Employees can also view their personalized social feed in Slack as well as the leaderboard and any incentive campaigns they’re participating in. For actions that are still done in our web application, we’ve included quick links so employees can be redirected with one click.

Our customers tell us that these additions have made using Qarrot even easier, since employees can participate in their recognition program right from a work tool they use everyday! Increased participation improves employee engagement with the program, thereby helping to drive better results for both employers and their staff.

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Adding Qarrot to your Slack account is easy. Read our help center article here.

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Our work here isn’t done! We’re aiming to provide access to more actions and to further improve the Slack experience over the coming year.

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Qarrot for Microsoft Teams

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In 2023, we also launched our app for Microsoft Teams. Find Qarrot in the Microsoft AppSource marketplace

We’re very excited about Qarrot for Microsoft Teams. Like with Slack, customers can install Qarrot so that the app is available for all employees. Plus, they can connect the public social feed to a Teams channel. 

But, the reason for our enthusiasm is that all Qarrot features and functionality are available in the desktop version of Microsoft Teams. 

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For example, the look and feel of Qarrot are the same as those of our web application. And admins, managers, and employees can perform all actions within the Teams app! There isn’t any need to toggle between Teams and our web application whether you’re sending a recognition, entering a campaign result, redeeming for a reward, or pulling a report.

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Note that Microsoft limits certain actions, such as redeeming rewards, on the mobile version of the Teams app.

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Adding Qarrot to your Teams account is easy. Read our help center article here. 

And if your organization uses Outlook, you can similarly add Qarrot to your account in the same way as you would for Teams. 

Our work here also isn’t done! We’re continually looking for ways to make our Teams and Outlook experience even better, whether that’s through additional alerts and notifications or enabling employees to send recognitions from right within a Teams channel.

Plus, we’re very close to launching Qarrot for another major productivity and communication platform! We’re incredibly excited about this upcoming development and will share further news soon.

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We’re excited. This is big. Really BIG.

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On May 18, 2022, we look forward to introducing you to Qarrot 3.0. This 3rd generation of our employee recognition platform includes many updates and some very cool new features.

Plus, Qarrot 3.0 includes a whole new look. So if you liked Qarrot before, we’re confident that you’ll love what our customer success, product, engineering, quality, and marketing folks have been hard at work on for the past while.

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Want to learn more? Keep reading.

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Why are we making changes to Qarrot?

Since the inaugural launch of Qarrot in 2017, we have continually updated the platform by adding new features, functionality, beefing up the system’s infrastructure, creating mobile apps, fixing bugs, and more.

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Along the way, we’ve learned a lot. A better way to build and manage Qarrot across its web, iOS, and Android applications. Better ways of organizing and presenting the app, so that it’s easier and more fun to use for administrators and employees, alike. More powerful solutions for managing and organizing employee data so that larger organizations can use Qarrot as successfully as smaller ones. And, we’ve learned a lot from customers and users like you, who have provided feedback about tweaks and improvements to Qarrot that would make it work better for you. 

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What is changing with Qarrot 3.0?

In short, a lot.

Apart from upgrades to our back-end infrastructure that aren’t readily visible to users, below are some of the improvements we hope will make Qarrot work better for you:

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A brand new design. 

With Qarrot 3.0, we’re introducing a new look to the entire application. Along with the clean layout, here are some changes you’ll notice:

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1. The menu now appears along the top of your viewport, not on the left-hand side

2. Your points and badges are now more visibly presented to the left of the social feed

3. Your campaigns and any pinned announcements now appear to the right of the social feed

4. The social feed has also been upgraded with posts now presenting information more clearly

5. Plus, badges are now larger and have a new hexagonal shape, which we love! 

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Addition of Spanish and French!

If you prefer to interact with your program in another language, now you can change your display language to Spanish (International) or French (Canada) or stay with English:

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Our menus, labels, instructions, and notifications will now display in the language you select. 

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New notification center and more control over communication preferences.

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Now you can access your notification center by clicking on the intray icon next to your avatar from any section. Plus, we’ve added the ability for you to select which notifications you receive by push or by email so that you only receive the ones you want. 

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Better campaigns. 

We’ve revamped campaigns so that it’s easier to view important details and have added a new global leaderboard so that participants can readily see how they’re doing.

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Plus, you’ll no longer receive an award winner notification and social feed post every time someone earns points within a campaign. We’re replacing these with one consolidated award winner post and notification that will go out daily.

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Easier way to view and sort rewards. 

It’s now easier to filter and sort rewards - whether by country (if your account is multi-country), by type, and by value. Plus, newly added rewards have a new’ indicator on them and your most recent purchases are more easily viewable.

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Improved reward management. 

As a program administrator, you now can disable brands, specific gift card denominations (so that your rewards are only available above certain denominations), and entire categories.

Plus, if you create customer or company-provided rewards, you have the ability to set multiple people for fulfillment (previously, we provided just one person). And you can now set stock limits so that if you have a limited quantity of any item, this can be set for the reward.

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A new way to organize and find your people. 

As a program administrator, you can now create custom fields for employee profiles that allow for better organization and filtering of your people.

For example, you may wish to create the custom field “Department” so that each employee’s department can be added to their profile. This way, when you create a new campaign, you can easily filter the people you want to invite based on their department. Or if you’re an employee, you can filter people by department in order to more easily find the person you want to recognize.

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Custom fields make it easier to filter people across all sections of Qarrot - whether you’re an administrator or a regular employee. And you can create as many as you need.

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A new dashboard for people managers.

Now team leads (aka managers) have their own team dashboard. While appearing identical to the dashboard available to program administrators, it differs in that it only includes the data for the members of that team. If a manager is the team lead for more than one team, she can easily toggle between teams to view the dashboard for each. 

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And with so many other changes across Qarrot, we encourage you to take a moment on May 18th to review your account and familiarize yourself with the new look, layout, and feature updates.

And there’s more to come! Our roadmap for 2022-23 is packed full of new features, integrations, and other updates.

For now, we hope you enjoy the current updates and encourage you to contact our customer success team should you have any questions.

The past few years have brought significant growth and development here at Qarrot. 

We’ve had the good fortune to welcome many new customers from a wide range of industries with employees in dozens of different countries. We’ve continued to listen to our customers and add new features and functionality based on their feedback. Further, we’ve grown our team and entered into distribution partnerships. 

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And for the past year, we’ve been developing a relationship with the team at Vantage Circle, a global leading employee engagement solution. Its AI-powered employee engagement suite includes, Vantage Rewards, Vantage Perks, Vantage Pulse, and Vantage Fit. And its roster of customers includes well-known brands such as Wipro, Tata Communications, LnT Infotech, Airtel, and Bosch.

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Though Vantage Circle and Qarrot focus on different market segments, we have a similar vision for the global employee recognition market and where it’s headed. Moreover, we have complimentary experience and perspectives.

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And, so, I’m very excited to share that Vantage Circle has made a strategic investment in Qarrot. Read the full press release here.

This investment will bring both organizations closer together and provide further fuel for Qarrot to grow and better serve small to mid-sized businesses with its easy-to-use employee recognition solution.

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With that in mind, the team at Qarrot is looking forward to a year ahead with many exciting product updates, lots of further growth, and a great new partnership with Vantage Circle.

During the height of the pandemic we found ourselves discussing an exciting new distribution partnership with a leading gift voucher vendor in the UK, Motivates.

Motivates provides Life:Style, the UK’s most flexible gift voucher with over 120 best-loved brands. 

And with a large and growing number of corporate customers using Life:Style to reward and recognize their employees, Motivates is optimally positioned to market Qarrot in the UK.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the formal launch of our partnership with Motivates. As the exclusive reseller of Qarrot in the UK, Motivates will offer a compelling combination of our cloud-based employee recognition software featuring their Life:Style gift voucher. 

In addition, Motivates’ customers will be able to pay for their Qarrot subscriptions and fund their voucher purchases in Great British Pounds (GBP).

The combination of Qarrot and Life:Style is already starting to make an impact. Shortly after our ‘soft launch’, Motivates signed up their first Qarrot account. And with the formal launch now under way, both parties are excited about the potential business opportunities that lie ahead.

Learn more about Motivates and the Life:Style gift voucher here.

Aaron Carr, the founder and CEO of Qarrot, had the pleasure to take part in a Q&A with Sourceforge - the place developers and companies go to access the latest software and business applications. Learn about the vision and motivation behind the creation of Qarrot, the benefits of greater employee experience and engagement and how the platform's features help organizations achieve these benefits.

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What type of software is Qarrot?

Qarrot is a cloud-based employee rewards and recognition software. With Qarrot, small to mid-sized organizations can implement recognition programs for their employees.

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Why target small to mid-sized businesses with Qarrot?

Great question. Historically, employee recognition vendors have offered their solutions to large enterprises with thousands of employees. These types of organizations typically purchase large volumes of rewards such as merchandise and gift cards, which has long been at the core of vendors’ business models. This has left smaller organizations – who don’t purchase large volumes of rewards –  without access to the sorts of recognition program capabilities available to large companies.

Accordingly, we felt it was important to create a product that could serve the needs of the small to mid-sized business. There are millions of SMEs globally and with our software-as-a-service business model, we can easily get them up and running on Qarrot at prices they can afford.

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What types of benefits can employers expect using Qarrot?

Employers increasingly face challenges recruiting, developing, and retaining talent. We see this across most industries and types of work. And while many employers have recruitment and training initiatives for their staff, many still lack the tools to keep their employees engaged over the long term. That’s where employee recognition programs can be a powerful asset for most organizations.

A well-managed recognition program helps employees feel more appreciated, reinforces positive behaviors, and motivates stronger performance. As a result, employees feel more engaged and are less likely to leave the organization voluntarily. Not to mention a host of other benefits: We’ve seen customers use recognition to improve sales performance, customer service, as well as employee well-being and health.

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How does Qarrot enable employers to achieve these benefits? What kinds of features does your software provide?

Qarrot is both feature-rich and easy to use. I always like to highlight this fact because ease-of-implementation and use are critical to the typical small to mid-sized business.

Qarrot helps organizations improve morale, celebrate important milestones, and motivate stronger performance. How do we do this?

It starts with the ability to encourage positive interactions amongst employees. With Qarrot both managers and employees can be enabled to recognize others for their contributions.

Often referred to as “peer-to-peer recognition”, this feature lets an employee send a message, a badge – often representing a company’s core value, as well as points to a coworker. Recognitions are displayed on a social media ‘news feed’ within the app so that all employees can learn about the recognitions of their peers, even liking or commenting on those posts.

Recognizing good performance is critical to helping employees feel valued and, by extension, improve morale. And with so many workers now doing their jobs remotely, it’s also a great way for teams to maintain a sense of connection and togetherness.

Organizations can also help celebrate important employee milestones like birthdays, anniversaries, and years of service with our milestone awards. This feature lets your program admin create automated awards that Qarrot will send to employees on the given milestone dates. These awards also are published to the social media feed, allowing others to celebrate a colleague having a birthday or important anniversary.

But, the feature that makes Qarrot “carrot” is award campaigns. This feature allows managers to motivate team performance and to align their staff around specific goals, KPIs, or tasks.

Campaigns are goal-based awards and can be used for everything from sales targets, customer service metrics, operational goals, to health and wellness challenges.

All recognitions and awards (milestone and campaign awards) can include badges that are custom-created by organizations’ program admins as well as points.

Badges are also a fun way for organizations to celebrate their culture as part of their recognition program. For example, most of our customers create a badge for each of their core values so that when an employee sends a recognition, she can choose the badge that represents the core value demonstrated by the person she’s recognizing.

And points can be redeemed for rewards! Qarrot not only offers a catalog with hundreds of leading brands in 30+ countries but customers can create their own custom rewards. These ‘company-provided’ rewards can be anything from a paid vacation day to company-branded merchandise, to local businesses not otherwise available in our platform.

In fact, most of our customers add a couple of custom rewards to their Qarrot catalog so that their employees have the choice of both the leading brands available as well as company-provided benefits.

Speaking of customization, customers can also easily customize their program using Qarrot. It’s easy to set your own point value, add your branding, as well as turn ‘on’ or ‘off’ certain features depending on what you want for your program.

Finally, I’d add that program admins also have access to data and reporting so that they can monitor employee participation and evaluate program effectiveness.

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That’s great, thanks. Tell us more about a typical customer and how they’d use these features to achieve their goals.

Sure. A typical customer has around 50-200 employees and, very often, only a small number of people in a human resources role.

Typically, they’re primarily focused on improving employee engagement and strengthening their culture. But they’re also interested in celebrating employee birthdays and anniversaries as well as equipping managers to boost team performance.

To achieve these goals, the customer would enable ‘Employee-to-Employee’ recognition and create badges based on each of their core values. This lets employees recognize one another for demonstrating the core values of the organization, which not only boosts engagement but reinforces organizational culture.

The customer could also enable employees or managers to include points when they send recognitions, to enhance the motivational effect of the program.

Plus, the customer can create Milestone Awards that automatically recognize employees on their birthdays and work anniversaries.

Finally, managers can create Award Campaigns when they want to challenge their team to hit tough-to-achieve goals, KPIs, or to complete certain tasks. Campaigns include a real-time leaderboard, so employees can see how they’re doing relative to their co-workers, which is a great way of injecting some fun competition into motivating performance.

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You mentioned that it’s easy to get started using Qarrot. How does a company get started?

Anyone wishing to learn more about Qarrot, can request a demo or free trial. And when they’re ready to move forward, they sign up for a ‘one-hour’ onboarding session during which one of our customer success leads will create their Qarrot account and train them on the administrative features of the software. At that point, the customer has a live account and the know-how to get started.

We also provide ongoing support, a knowledge base with lots of articles, as well as employee onboarding materials to simplify the onboarding process.

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And what types of pricing plans do you offer? Do customers need to sign a contract?

Our pricing is simple. Customers pay a subscription fee per user per month as well as the cost of any gift cards redeemed through their account. The subscription fee starts at $3 per employee, but we offer volume discounts for 200 employees or more as well as monthly and annual pricing options.

Customers on a monthly plan don’t need to sign a contract. However, for customers on an annual subscription, we’ll usually put our 2-page subscription pricing agreement in place.

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Finally, how can companies get in touch to learn more about Qarrot?

Easy; companies can either reach out to our sales team directly or visit Qarrot’s SourceForge profile page to request a demo or free trial.

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Read the full article on SourceForge.net

For the past few months, we’ve been in discussions with Weeve.ai, a really cool conversational employee platform, about a strategic partnership.

To date, Qarrot hasn’t entered into any partnerships that I would describe as "strategic". So, you might be curious to ask: Why now? And, why Weeve.ai?

If nothing else, the past 6 months have caused us to think deeply about how the workplace is changing. Remote work is creating many challenges that most managers hadn’t previously had to contend with. For many, the days of casually catching up with a colleague or team member in the hallway or in a meeting room are gone for good.

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These changes not only impact how organizations boost morale and improve performance, but also how managers stay in touch with their employees to gauge how they’re doing and what support they may need.

That’s what’s so cool about Weeve.ai. They’ve developed an empathetic AI chatbot, called Kim, that has organic conversations with employees to understand what’s going well and where change is needed.

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When there are issues, Kim escalates them. Now, with the power of Qarrot, Kim also brings your team's wins to your attention so you can recognize and reward them in a timely and meaningful way.

Combined, we believe that Weeve + Qarrot represents a truly powerful solution for people leaders and managers of all stripes.

To learn more about our combined solution, see our video here: www.weeve.ai/weeve-qarrot