That’s why a new company is trying to disrupt the corporate gifts market. Alyce is a new AI powered platform that gives businesses an easier and more effective way to select and send gifts to prospects, clients and other corporate contacts.
Founder and CEO Greg Segall said in an email interview with Small Business Trends, “Every business leader I have talked to — and I have interviewed hundreds of them — has reaffirmed that corporate gift-giving takes too much time, costs them too much money, and they are left wondering whether their gift had any impact at all.”
Corporate Gift Giving Platform Uses AI
Alyce uses AI to match your gift recipient to the perfect gift for them. The platform has more than 30,000 potential gifts to choose from. Then it takes into account relevant social data and your business’s goals to select a gift that’s personalized to each individual. The recipient receives a notification that they’ve received a gift, at which point they can accept, choose another gift or even donate the money to charity.
Segall adds, “So for example, imagine a sales team or a customer success team sending an annual thank you gift to their best clients, which is timed to hit at a certain point in the customer lifecycle. Imagine knowing you could actually send a gift to each and every customer that represented what they individually might like to receive, while also giving them the power of choice to select something else, or even donate the value of their gift to a charity that they choose.”
Segall explains, “Not only does Alyce know what that customer would want, and empower that customer to accept the gift or make another selection of their own choosing, but Alyce also knows when the gift was sent, when the gift was accepted — and all of this data can be used to measure the impact of that gift against customer relationship management metrics.”
Before starting Alyce, Segall owned an ecommerce agency and often received corporate gifts that just didn’t fit with his own preferences. He was struck by just how wasteful this process seemed to be. And that eventually led to the founding of Alyce.
He says, “Not just during the holidays, but throughout the year and for different reasons, vendors and partners we worked with would send us a ton of gifts. And more often than not, those gifts had nothing to do with anything we would’ve ever chosen for ourselves. Not their fault, because they didn’t have any insight to know, for example, that I’m a health nut, when they sent me a huge box of chocolates. Or that I wear a men’s size small when they otherwise sent me an expensive extra-large fleece jacket branded with their corporate logo. Once I actually received a giant branded Patagonia jacket stuffed with chocolates that melted all over the jacket before I ever unwrapped the gift box they were sent in!”
Eventually, Segall came to the conclusion all of this added up to a great opportunity. He recalls, “After I sold my ecommerce agency, I found myself going back to this again and again: There is just an incredible amount of time, money and energy spent in sending corporate gifts, with very little visibility into how to send a gift that someone actually wants, let alone how to measure the impact of sending the gift itself. I was sick of all the waste, and I also believed there was an opportunity to better connect corporate gift-giving to the power of doing good with charitable giving options. This was the start of the hunch that there was an industry to disrupt here, and what got me focused on starting Alyce.”
Of course, the overall goal is to help businesses give gifts that will actually help them achieve their goals. “It’s the thought that counts,” is a notion that only takes you so far when you’re sending that top client or partner a generic desk adornment that they’ve received from every other company they do business with as well,” Segall observes.
So the platform also keeps track of when you send gifts, who you send them to, and what gifts were chosen or accepted so you can see what actions might actually lead to increased sales, retention or other important metrics for your business.
Segall says, “We started Alyce because we really believe in the power of a gift to spark a reaction, create an emotion, and elicit a fantastic response — all the things people experience when they give and receive gifts in their personal life. There’s absolutely no reason that gift power can’t exist for business gift giving exchanges as well. Our ultimate goal is to reinvent this entire $120 billion corporate gift-giving market into something memorable, meaningful and measurable — one perfect gift at a time.”
Image: Alyce.com