Facilitating Secure Reward Distribution Through Digital Platforms

Protect Your Rewards Program from Fraud

As a business, it’s important to take care of your most important assets – your employees and customers.

Without employees, you wouldn’t be able to drive significant business initiatives, and without customers, none of those initiatives would really matter to start with.

Showing your appreciation to both groups with a  rewards and incentives program is a great way to build long-lasting relationships.

However, programs can sometimes introduce challenges, including  security risks that result from the use of digital reward systems. 

It’s important to be aware of how these risks can affect your company, and choose the right tools and strategies to create more secure reward distribution processes.

Why Offering Digital Rewards Can Be Risky

Offering digital gift cards to customers and employees has become a common practice for modern businesses.

They’re a cost-effective, convenient, and flexible way for businesses to show appreciation.

However, many of the platforms used for these programs lack adequate security protocols. This leads to a number of risks, including:

Fraudulent Redemption and Generation

While e-gift cards are easy to create and distribute, they’re also vulnerable to digital fraud. 

For starters, recipients or other parties to whom e-gift cards are forwarded could potentially try to exploit redemption systems, underscoring the need to protect your rewards program from fraud at every touchpoint.

This can lead to additional business funds being automatically debited without company’s being aware. 

In other situations, cybercriminals might try to use legitimate e-gift card emails to create their own phishing schemes.

Bad actors may create templated emails with malicious scripts or files, tempting recipients to open or “download” their gift card codes, only to introduce viruses into recipient systems.

Unauthorized Access to Reward Funds and Recipient Data

Reward platforms offer a new digital endpoint through which businesses can move and control funds.

This creates a new opportunity for hackers to try and exploit. If they’re able to compromise platform credentials and gain entry, bad actors could potentially start creating their own rewards using business funds.

Another critical issue that these digital platforms can introduce relates to data privacy.

Sending an e-gift card to an employee or customer often requires  the storage of certain personal data.

While access to funds may be one target for attackers, the ability to collect personal information on employees and customers can also be a primary goal.

Networked System Breaches

Because digital reward platforms often allow businesses to integrate other applications and services, security risks can extend beyond the platform itself.

Networked services like mail clients, payment processors, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms, or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems can also be at risk if the platforms they’re connected to are compromised.

Key Principles for Securing Your Digital Reward Distribution

In order to keep your reward systems more secure, it’s important to take precautions regarding the platforms you choose and the internal policies and procedures you create.

Below are some key principles you can follow to create safer digital reward distribution strategies:

Robust Access Controls and Permissions

A first step to keep your digital reward system more secure is to control who has regular access to it.

While you’ll want to make sure the appropriate team members can use the system, this doesn’t mean they should have more permissions than necessary to accomplish tasks.

Instead, only grant minimum permissions and implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) protocols to help protect against unauthorized system access.

Secure Data Management and Encryption

Protecting your recipient’s data should be a top priority for your business when rewarding employees with e-gift cards or sending incentives to customers.

An important element you can use to achieve this is data encryption.

Data encryption helps to protect sensitive information at rest or in transit, essentially making it unreadable in the event of a breach or accidental exposure.

However, encrypting your data isn’t necessarily enough to keep recipient data fully protected.

You should also regularly audit your data handling practices and ensure you properly remove and dispose of customer and employee data when it’s no longer needed.

Transparent and Auditable Processes

The procedures for how your program is managed should be clearly outlined and transparent.

This not only enhances employee and customer trust in your systems, but will also help flag any irregularities.

To achieve this, you’ll want to begin with detailed logs of all activities, giving you a clear record for tracking and analyzing reward redemptions and platform access.

You should also implement approval workflows, especially for larger reward amounts, to reduce the risk of administrative errors or platform misuse.

Make it a habit to regularly audit any of the security measures you’ve put in place and look for potential weak spots that may need to be addressed. 

Efficient Workflow Management

Optimizing your digital reward workflows doesn’t just streamline how things run day-to-day – it also helps with your security.

Creating smoother reward distribution processes minimizes potential processing errors or delays that could create issues.

To help with this, consider if and where automation might be useful.

Automating tasks like generating or distributing reward codes can make workflows faster and much more accurate.

You can also build in predefined security parameters to ensure sure each step of the process maximizes data privacy.

Outside of the technical details, be sure to prioritize clear communication and collaboration with everyone involved in your reward distribution process.

Makes sure everyone clearly understands the role they play when operating digital platforms to help to address any issues that pop up along the way.

Monitoring, Auditing, and Continuous Improvement

As your business scales, it’s important to make sure your reward distribution program is properly maintained and provides the security you need moving forward.

In order to do this, you’ll want to continuously monitor how your rewards are being distributed and track key metrics that might alert you when changes are necessary.

Your regular system audits should help identify if and when the workflows you have in place are becoming less effective.

Take the time to review the auditing information you’ve gathered and compare it against historical data.

Look for any apparent patterns and identify those that might point to workflow inefficiencies for employees or customers.

You should also look for anomalies in platform access that may be signs of unauthorized access attempts, requiring an additional security process to manage.

Choosing the Right Tools and Strategies

Making smart choices about the platforms and digital tools your business relies on is critical to keep your business – and its customers – safe.

To do this, you’ll need to consider some important elements:

Important Platform Features to Prioritize

• Put Security First – Before choosing a platform for your reward distribution, it’s important to verify the robustness of security protocols. Look for platforms that use active data encryption, have strict user access controls, and provide you with logs you can audit to ensure compliance with regulatory standards.
  

• Keep It Scalable – Consider the current and potential future needs of your business before settling on a platform. You’ll want to make sure any solutions you use to manage employee or customer rewards can support higher volumes of usage over time, without disrupting any workflows you have in place.
  

• Verify Compatibility – Think about the integrations you may need with the platform you choose. Not all platforms can support third-party platform integrations or they may not be compatible with the ones you use regularly. By finding a rewards platform that fits into your current technology stack, you’ll be able to automate more of your workflows or leverage additional security services to help manage and secure company reward procedures.

Make Use of Project Management and Collaboration Tools

If your business has a larger team, it’s essential that everyone is able to collaborate effectively on company reward initiatives.

There are a variety of cost-effective project management tools you can invest in to help make this happen. 

These solutions give you the ability to organize the tasks each of your employees and departments manages while also helping them stay accountable when tackling specific workloads or platform updates—all while helping to protect your rewards program from fraud by keeping responsibilities clear and workflows traceable.

Project management tools are also a great for auditing various issues that come up or receiving helpful feedback from team members that can be used to improve your reward management and distribution efforts.

Balancing Security with User Experience and Efficiency

While security is always important, you still need to find a good balance so digital protection doesn’t negatively impact the user experience or platform efficiency.

Security measures that are too complex can frustrate both your administrators and recipients.

The goal is to have effective security that isn’t overly difficult to work with. 

Your platform should be straightforward for admins to manage, and the process for recipients to get and use their rewards should be simple.

Regularly assess how user-friendly your process is and look for ways to streamline it without cutting corners on security—especially when your goal is to protect your rewards program from fraud.

Clear instructions and strong support can make a big difference in this regard.

The Importance of Training and User Adoption

Even the best tools and security can fail if people aren’t properly trained or don’t follow the procedures in place.

You’ll need to provide comprehensive training so your administrators know how to use the platform securely, handle sensitive recipient data correctly, and protect your rewards program from fraud at every step.

Clear instructions are just as important for your reward recipients, so they understand how to access and redeem rewards safely.

Communicating the program’s benefits clearly and providing regular support as needed will encourage better platform adoption and reduce the number of security risks that can surface.

Leveraging Backlog and Cacoo for More Streamlined and Secure Reward Distribution

When trying to create a more streamlined and secure way to handle your reward distribution initiatives, it really comes down to two main things – organized project management and improved data visibility.

Nulab is a team collaboration solution that offers a range of products to help businesses achieve just that.

By combining Nulab products like Backlog and Cacoo, you can help teams stay more organized while leveraging real-time collaborative diagramming and enterprise-grade security to safely and efficiently manage your digital rewards.

Streamlining Distribution with Backlog’s Project Management

Backlog is an all-in-one task management tool that helps businesses track all of their essential workflows.

When it comes to planning projects like employee and customer reward distribution, Backlog lets you break each supporting workflow into clear management tasks for your teams.

Whether you need to assign individual tasks, set specific due dates for important milestones, or simply get a clear picture of how things are progressing, Backlog provides all of these capabilities and more.

Your business can even set up custom workflows for reward distribution approvals, allowing you to gain more granular control over spending and minimize administrative errors.

Visualizing Security and Workflows with Cacoo

When planning your security process and supporting workflows, it’s important to have a clear strategy in place.

Cacoo is an online diagramming tool that makes it easy for teams to collaborate on important security wireframes or flowcharts.

This can be invaluable when recognizing each of the digital touchpoints (and potential vulnerabilities) within digital reward platforms—helping you protect rewards program from fraud by visually prioritizing areas of improvement.

By providing your teams with the ability to build and edit helpful business diagrams in real-time, you’re able to create a seamless solution for securing critical business platforms.

You can also make sure everyone has the same understanding of where, when, and how security protocols should be executed.

This takes out the guesswork when trying to create safer digital environments for employees and customers, and helps to ensure you’re meeting any regulatory business requirements.

Create a Safer Way to Reward Your Employees and Customers

Digital rewards programs can be incredibly convenient and impactful for businesses, but it’s also important to recognize the security risks they can introduce—and take steps to protect rewards programs from fraud before problems arise.

By following these strategies and using the right tools to harden your digital platform security, you’ll be able to build more loyalty and confidence in both your teams and customers.