Company Profiles: Spotlight on Travel and Tech

Do you offer retirement planning as part of your small business employee benefit package? If not, you may be in danger of losing good workers to your competitors who do. According to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, retirement savings plans were offered by 67 percent of employers in 2018. Within the companies offering this benefit, 79 percent of employees participated.  

RewardExpert recently spoke with Joseph Mrozek, vice president and national sales manager for Lincoln Financial Group’s retirement plan services, about why a retirement savings plan is an important employee benefit and why employers should choose Lincoln Financial Group to provide it.

Whenever you travel, you sometimes try to forget whatever is at home. The work emails, the busy calls, rush hour traffic or your upstairs neighbor who vacuums at 3 A.M.

But that’s the point of a vacation, you’re supposed to get away, chill out and just relax. Want to sit on the beach all day? Do it. Want to go see every art museum in town? Do it.

Whether you’re onboarding new employees, training a current workforce, educating customers or marketing to prospects, video is the next best thing to communicating face-to-face. RewardExpert recently spoke with Stacy Adams, head of marketing at Vyond, to learn how the company’s easy-to-use platform is putting the power of engaging animation within reach of every business budget.

Whether you’re a small startup or a Fortune 500 company, you want quality and predictability from the designers and developers you enlist to create mobile apps, websites and software for your business. Of course, finding those professionals can be time-consuming, and projects don’t always go as planned—leading to delays and bigger-than-budgeted invoices. Unless, that is, you use Topcoder to crowdsource solutions to your technology needs.

RewardExpert spoke with Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder, about how the growing global community of design, development, and data science experts is delivering affordable digital solutions fast.  

Connecting businesses with voice talent has never been easier than with Voices.com. If you are a business needing a voiceover done quickly, or if you’re a professional artist looking to make extra money from home, Voices.com is the place to help save you time and money. RewardExpert had the privilege of connecting with David Ciccarelli, co-founder and CEO of Voices.com to discuss his business, and how it has really impacted the voiceover industry.

Security is one of the most pressing issues on the internet today. After all, cyber breaches and malware attacks can cost companies billions of dollars and can break trust with customers. With so much at stake, companies need to stay ahead of the curve to stay secure.  One company at the forefront of security is Yubico. Jerrod Chong, chief solutions officer at Yubico, spoke to RewardExpert about how Yubico is making the internet safer. “We believe that the time for everyone to embrace strong authentication is now,” said Chong.

According to Internet Retailer, a premier online business information resource, consumers spent $517.36 billion online at U.S. merchants in 2018, a 15 percent increase over the prior year. B2B online spending is also increasing, with one expert resource predicting U.S. B2B ecommerce will reach $1.8 trillion by 2023. What does this mean for you? If you’re not already doing business online, you’re leaving potentially significant revenue on the table.

Of course, developing your ecommerce sales channel requires a financial investment. But it doesn’t have to be a huge one. We spoke to Andy Barker, head of payments and digital experience at Magento, an Adobe Company, about how the leading provider of cloud commerce innovation is helping merchants drive business growth without breaking the bank.

Fast, simple and effective communication is vital to growing a business. After all, if you can’t talk and collaborate with clients, team members and vendors, the chances of growing your business begin to diminish. A company called Dialpad is offering a comprehensive suite of communications tools, incorporating the latest technology to make sure businesses stay ahead of the curve. Dialpad is the only AI-drive , cloud-native business communications platform offering voice, video, messaging and more. Krysha Nair, director of product marketing at Dialpad, spoke to RewardExpert about how it all works and how it can benefit companies big and small.

If you are a millennial or know any millennials, then you know how important experiences are to this particular generation. One of the biggest experiences that millennials gravitate to is travel experiences. Being able to experience the different foods, languages, and entertainment of different cultures is exactly what millennials are looking for when it comes to what they spend their money on.

As doing business becomes an increasingly globalized undertaking —whether you’re merely selling and shipping goods overseas or have an actual physical presence in multiple countries— multilingualism is also increasing in importance. In some cases, a multilingual workforce can even mean the difference between engaging new consumers and growing your bottom line or watching your brand’s reputation slowly wither away on the vine.

RewardExpert spoke with Ozge Ozcer, business development director at busuu, the world’s largest community for language learning, about how the company is helping global businesses improve customer experience and increase sales.

A functioning and easy to use website is critical for a growing business. While the task of building a website for your brand may seem like a daunting and expensive undertaking, there is a way to create wonderful, personalized websites for free without having to be an expert coder. An Israeli company called Wix is helping do just that. Matt Rosenberg, public relations and communications manager for Wix, spoke to RewardExpert about how it works. “It’s really saving you time and letting you run your business,” he said.

As American author Stephen King once said, “Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.” But what if you’re flying off on vacation and forgot your book at home? Or maybe you’re driving across town –or across country– and can’t safely read? In these cases –and many others– audiobooks are the perfect answer.

RewardExpert recently spoke with Jemma Wolfe, marketing communications manager at Audiobooks.com, about the audiobook service’s history and subscription platform as well as her recommendations for the best personal finance titles to listen to the next time you need a little entertainment.

It’s critical for merchants to accept online payments in an easy, clear and precise way.  After all, providing a positive payments experience and building beneficial relationships with customers is a critical way to grow a business. While there are a number of payment processing options out there, Elavon believes its product stands out from the field in providing superior customer service.

Executive Vice President and General Manager of North American Business, Joe Myers, spoke to RewardExpert about the advantages of using the company for all your payment needs.

If you visit a website, chances are you will be shown an ad for a site you visited previously. Did you ever notice that little blue triangle in the corner of internet ads? That’s the AdChoices symbol, and it means that the advertiser is part of the AdChoices program – a program set up by the non-profit Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) to help companies self-regulate internet ads. Lou Mastria is the DAA’s executive director. He spoke to RewardExpert about the organization, which was set up to help enforce privacy practices and provide consumers with enhanced transparency and control over internet ads.

Easy to integrate. Scalable. User-friendly, robust and feature-rich. These are the words every business owner wants to hear when evaluating digital security solutions. Unfortunately, most providers offer products and services that fail to live up to that description.

Not so RSA. A Dell Technologies company, RSA offers business-driven security solutions that are exactly that. The company’s suite of services helps organizations grow and thrive despite ever-increasing and evolving digital risk. RewardExpert sat down with Peter Beardmore, director of digital risk solutions and RSA spokesperson, to learn more.

In today’s fast-paced digital business environment, data breaches happen daily and can be devastating to an organization’s reputation and revenues. Some of the biggest in recent years include a data breach at Marriott International (which impacted 500 million customers), Equifax (which exposed the personal information of nearly 148 million customers), and Uber (which left 57 million customers and 600,000 Uber drivers vulnerable to identity theft).

RewardExpert recently spoke with Donald Hasson, BeyondTrust’s senior director of product management, about how the company’s privileged access management (PAM) portfolio can help other businesses reduce their risks of a data breach with simple to integrate solutions that enhance user productivity and maximize IT security.

Whatever your business, the experience you provide consumers is central to your success. Companies that find ways to improve that experience often outshine the rest. RewardExpert recently spoke with Entrust Datacard CMO Karen Kaukol about the organization’s solutions and how businesses around the world are using them to improve service, create trust and increase revenue.  

With interest rates on new vehicles the highest the market has seen in a decade according to Edmunds, a leading online resource for automotive information, getting the best price on your next car –whether new or used– is more important than ever. RewardExpert recently sat down with Eugene Park, Edmunds’ chief product officer, to learn more about the resources the company offers to guide car shoppers from research through purchase as well as tips for maximizing your savings.  

Most consumers don’t think about payment processing. They choose what they want to buy, place it in a physical or virtual cart, pay with a credit or debit card, and go on their way. Unless there is a problem –like a credit card denial at the register or a double charge later discovered on a bill– they’re blissfully unaware of everything that goes on after the merchant collects their payment data.

The Electronic Transactions Association (ETA), on the other hand, is very aware of the players involved in taking that data and processing the actual payment. As the leading trade association for the payments industry, looking out for those companies is the ETA’s sole purpose. RewardExpert recently spoke with Interim CEO Amy Zirkle to find out more.

Technology has come a long way in the past few decades. And it has connected people in ways that generations before would have never thought possible. RewardExpert had the opportunity to speak with Director of Financial Services Solutions Marketing, Damien Simonneau, of Vidyo, a company that has revolutionized the world through its real-time video and cloud-based services.