The challenge
Physical rewards, poor support, and employees who stopped redeeming
KPIT's previous R&R program was built around physical gifts. A third-party vendor procured items from local suppliers and delivered them to employees' homes. In practice, this meant rewards were damaged in transit, customer support was unresponsive when issues were raised, and employees grew dissatisfied with both the quality of gifts and the experience of receiving them.
The result: employees with 3,000+ points in their accounts simply stopped redeeming. The platform itself compounded the problem - it was not robust, the interface was unintuitive, and there were no nudges to prompt employees or managers to act. Recognition was happening between managers and their direct reports, but it was invisible to the rest of the organization.
Every year KPIT runs an ESAT survey to measure employee satisfaction across HR, IT systems, training, and R&R. R&R scores were consistently low, reflecting the inadequacy of the existing platform. The company needed a new approach to build what it called a 'culture of excellence' - one that acknowledged employee effort and celebrated contributions at scale.
- Damaged physical rewards, items procured from local vendors were frequently damaged during delivery, with no responsive support to resolve issues.
- Low redemption rates, employees with significant point balances stopped redeeming because the available rewards felt poor value for money.
- No platform nudges, the existing system had no prompts to encourage managers or employees to participate in recognition workflows.
- Siloed recognition, appreciation was confined to individual manager-employee exchanges with no visibility across the organization.
The solution
One platform for recognition, rewards, and employee feedback
KPIT's prior positive experience with Xoxoday for long service awards gave the HR team confidence to evaluate Empuls as the platform for their full R&R transformation. Empuls offered a robust, user-friendly interface, a catalog of 20,000+ e-voucher options across geographies, and the survey and nudge capabilities KPIT needed to move its program from manual to systematic.
- Digital e-vouchers replaced physical gifting, eliminating delivery damage, logistics overhead, and the vendor coordination that had previously made rewards a source of frustration rather than appreciation.
- Townhall groups for social recognition, recognition posts became visible to the entire organization, not just the manager and employee involved, making appreciation a shared cultural moment.
- Empuls Nudges drove consistent participation, automated prompts notified employees when peers received appreciation, encouraging them to visit the post and engage, removing the need for HR to manually drive recognition activity.
- Global catalog with multi-currency redemption, KPIT's presence in the US, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Thailand meant any R&R platform needed to work across currencies and geographies. Empuls handled this natively.
- ESAT surveys migrated to Empuls, following successful adoption of Empuls Surveys across HRBPs and employees, KPIT moved its critical annual satisfaction survey from Google Forms to Empuls from early 2021.
The results
Rewards budget tripled. ESAT scores up. A visible culture of appreciation.
3×
Increase in quarterly rewards budget (15–20L to 45L)
20,000+
Reward options in the global e-voucher catalog
6+
Regions covered with multi-currency redemption
The shift to Empuls transformed how KPIT invested in recognition. Quarterly rewards budgets grew from 15–20 lakhs to nearly 45 lakhs, reflecting both higher manager confidence in the platform and organizational commitment to a culture of appreciation. Managers were actively encouraged to give more awards, and they did.
ESAT scores for R&R improved materially after the platform switch. Peer-to-peer appreciations tracked by the KPIT HR team showed a sustained increase month over month, with employees celebrating small wins in a way that had not been possible on the previous platform. KPIT's culture of excellence initiative had found a platform that could actually carry it.