Thanks for the hunt Eric and heya hunters!
I'm the CEO of Alyce and will be around with my team all day to answer your questions, so fire away.
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TL;DR
- Alyce is an A.I. that tells you the perfect corporate gifts to give using personal social data;
- Handles ordering, shipping and reporting for 1 or 10,000 gifts;
- Recipient can keep, exchange their gift or donate to a charity of their choice;
- Is 100% free.
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The inspiration for Alyce: I'm a super health nut and every holiday at my previous agency I would get tons (think dozens of baskets) of chocolates, brownies, moose munch, you name it from our partners and clients - most of which I knew their kid’s names. And most of it would end up in the garbage.
The main points we are targeting with Alyce:
1. It’s all about the utilization of the gift --- Would *you* really want that branded fanny pack you are about to send? If the gift isn’t going to be used then it becomes a burden (now you have to donate it, trash it or store it in your bottom drawer), hence killing the thought behind it. For the same $100 gift basket you are about to send, you can gift a 1-hour golf lesson with a PGA tour pro through Alyce.
2. Researching each person and handling fulfillment is super time consuming --- So Alyce and magical technology and A.I. to the rescue. We do have human checks on each gift (training the data) which is why it isn’t instantaneous.
3. We believe in the power of choice --- When a recipient receives an Alyce gift, they have the option of keeping it, exchanging it for anything else on the Alyce marketplace or donating it to one of 300 charities. We have a curated catalog of experiences, subscription products, services and badass physical products. Gifts range between $30-5,000.
4. A gift doesn’t have to be physical --- Think of the golf lesson above.
5. Branding the delivery of a gift is great, branding the actual gift is sacrilege --- With Alyce, you can send the gift via email, branded handwritten card or branded box (new option). An unbranded product will be used far more.
6. Corporate gifts are sent to instill action - close a prospect, resign a contract/decrease churn, retain your employees, etc --- Sending the right gift at the right time drives these actions. i.e. We have customers decreasing their churn by 5-10% by sending an Alyce 3 months before a contract renewal. $50 gift to save a $20,000 contract. It works.
We have deep integrations with many of the big CRMs in beta where we are using similar A.I. to help tell you the most impactful time to send a gift to accomplish an action. Salesforce is first, being released publicly coming in January. Happy to add you to the list!
Corporate gifting can be fun, enjoyable and strategic and we want to lead the charge. Let us know what you think!
Greg.
P.S. Alyce is only available for recipients in the U.S., but we are expanding into the UK and Canada in Q1 2017.
Hey guys, Andres from Alyce here. I'm pumped to share what we’ve been working on and to get your feedback.
The biggest challenge in corporate gifting is having to buy a gift for a client/employee you don’t know well (or not at all), and still be able to send gifts that are relevant to them.
Ultimately, many of these well-intentioned efforts end up falling short and gifts get wasted. After all, the utilization of the gift is also important.
But fear not. Alyce tells you the gift someone really wants by using publicly available social data and artificial intelligence. In addition, the platform allows users to:
- Send many gifts at once.
- Brand a handwritten card with a company's logo & colors.
- Get end-to-end support: from ordering, shipping, and customer support.
Alyce is on a mission to support moments of uplift and kindness that connect and celebrate one-to-one relationships through corporate gifts that rock. We're here to give corporate gifting a little facelift 😉
Feel free to visit our site to see how spot-on our gift suggestions are for you, or, check out this article on Inc. Magazine to learn more about us: http://www.inc.com/tom-popomaron...
The team and I will be around to answer questions all day, don't be shy! ✌️
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I really like the idea of this! Being in the service industry, we send gifts every year to different CIOs, etc. for a lot of different companies, without knowing much about the real interests of the people we are sending them to in many cases.
I noticed that it takes about an hour to generate gift ideas for names and email addresses that get input. Is the gift selection process fully automated or is there some manual search process on your end? Just curious :)
@tim_canada Thanks a lot Tim!
We do have a human check each gift that goes out and continues to train the data/A.I. - both confirming the social profiles, sociographic and demographic profile we create and the matching gifts. So it could take 10-15 minutes to get your suggestions, or an hour or so depending on how backed up things are. Happy to dive into/demo more of the backend if you are interested!
@tim_canada Awesome, send me an email at greg [at] alyce [dot] com!
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Our client success team has been using this for over a year and they love it! It's helped us save several high-value clients that "went dark" on us and helped reduce churn. It's great to see the reactions from clients when they get a gift from this system.
@chadledford Thanks so much for the shout out Chad. We're crushing it with you guys!
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My co-founder commented already but I wanted to reiterate how much Alyce has improved our gifting company-wide. It's helped mitigate churn, close prospects faster, and we've been able to get more positive reviews and referrals. Great work Alyce team!
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I've been using Alyce for over a year. It's fantastic. I use it for the typical client holiday gifts but I've also found it so easy to use — and that the recipients like it so much — that I've incorporated it into my client success model. In the old days (before Alyce) giving a client, employee or vendor a gift they actually liked was not easy and time-consuming. Now it's so simple that all I need to do is budget for it. Alyce handles the rest.
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