Frequently Asked Questions

• What is Surprise.com?
  Surprise.com is the world’s leading management success platform. Set organizational goals, drive positive behaviors, track progress and celebrate your team in ways they’ll never forget. Transition your team to greatness and grow the right way with Surprise.com.
• How does Surprise.com work?
  Surprise.com starts with the manager, the carrier of the team’s vision. As a first step, he or she will select the business objectives and the behaviors that the team needs to adopt to reach these objectives. These could be big rocks like improving attitude, work ethic, or hitting a cold call quota, or little rocks like completing code reviews on time, improving grammar in customer emails, or consistently entering data into CRM. Once selected, these behaviors and objectives become visible to team members in any communication platform you use (e.g. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Intranet, etc.) and on the delightful Surprise.com app.
  
  Next, when desired behaviors begin to take place, the employee will get a Surprise. Surprise can be triggered automatically through integrations like Salesforce (e.g. a sales development representative hit their target number of cold calls for the day), or through nominations, which can come from any member of the team, including the person themselves (self-nomination). Each Surprise is visible to everyone on the Team Feed, which acts as a powerful social reinforcement mechanism. Here employees can comment and encourage each other so that everyone knows what the organization collectively values.
  
  Additionally, each Surprise contains a delightful variable prize, ranging from free prizes like extra perks and privileges to paid prizes like digital gifts and experiences. You can read more about what a Surprise is in the next section.
  
  At the end of each week, both the manager and participating team member get to partake in the Surprise Day event, during which all positive behaviors are celebrated, and everyone can see the collective progress made toward the desired business objectives.
  
  This behavior transformation would simply not be attainable (or would take years!) without the right technology that lets teams self-regulate and collectively drive positive outcomes. For managers, there has never been a more effective, organic, and engaging way to gain visibility into the inner workings of their teams, and align them in a truly turnkey fashion.
• What’s a Surprise and what are the prizes?
  The core premise of a “Surprise” is something of value being given from sender to receiver. You have full freedom to pick what this value is. Importantly, there are many Surprises you can give on the platform that are completely free. For example, we’ve seen customers have their CEO make breakfast for the team, rename a conference room after someone, or have the whole team sing for the recipient on a Zoom call.
  
  You are welcome to also add your own self-funded prizes such as unused executive perks (e.g. box seats at a baseball game, vacation home, premier parking space, etc), company swag / merchandise, stock options, or a meal / activity together. For convenience, we also have a robust, global prize vendor network that can deliver both digital goods as well as unforgettable local in-person experiences in many cities around the world. Unlike most other vendors, we do not mark up the cost of the prizes.
• How much does Surprise.com cost?
  Put the remarkable emotion of Surprise to work for you, all for one low fixed monthly fee. Our entry-level plan starts from $8.99 per employee per month and includes unlimited behaviors. There are no hidden costs and all plans include fulfillment of digital prizes. Prizes are billed pay-as-you-go, or you are also welcome to use your own prizes at no additional cost. The number of employees is capped on the entry-level plan so please get in touch with us for enterprise deployments.
• How do I measure ROI?
  Surprise.com is a management success platform that’s designed to help you drive positive goal-directed behavior within your team to take their performance to the next level. There are four quantifiable ways to measure the ROI of Surprise.com. First is the Surprise.com Transformation Index™. It helps you track the progress of the positive behavior change(s) you set out to achieve under your campaign goals. The value you derive will depend on the importance of those goals to you, and can range from directly quantifiable goals (i.e. hitting sales quota), to more foundational ones (i.e. encouraging collaboration to innovate as a team). Before any behavior change begins, Surprise.com will establish a baseline with each individual employee, through a combination of Insights Questions and game mechanics, so you can track their real progress.
  
  Second, are Surprise.com Workforce Insights™. Our mission is to help your organization execute better, and having the right data and insights is critical to running a business in the 21st century. To that end, Surprise.com provides a much more effective and natural way to collect “employee mindset” data. Specifically, data is collected immersively [natively] as part of the Surprise opening experience, so the goodwill just built with the employee is much more likely to result in truthful, rich, and genuine data for the organization than the traditional and contrived employee survey. We then aggregate and transform this data into actionable predictive analytics about levels of engagement and manager relationships, helping you identify hot spots before they flare up.
  
  Third, is the increase in employee engagement. The majority of employees become disengaged because they are misaligned with their manager, and feel that their work is under-appreciated. Since managers themselves are often overworked, or lack the right tools for the job, a certain percentage of every employee base becomes disengaged, and the organization loses money paying people who underperform and don’t reach their full potential—it’s a lose-lose. Surprise.com tackles the engagement problem by first empowering employees to actively participate and take ownership in their team’s performance. Second, it gives managers access to a predictive analytics engine that helps discover and anticipate dark pools of disengagement before it becomes too late. And lastly, it is just plain fun – a big morale booster for your troops, especially in these challenging times.
  
  Fourth, is the reduction of employee turnover. Extensive independent research has conclusively shown that engaged employees are much less likely to leave an organization than their less engaged co-workers. By demonstrably increasing employee participation and engagement, Surprise.com helps managers retain their top talent, which can have a profound impact on your company’s top and bottom lines. It is estimated by experts that losing a high performing employee can cost an organization at least the equivalent of 6-9 months of base pay, and at most the opportunity cost of better execution and innovation.
• How do I cancel?
  Surprise.com is fully flexible with your needs. There are no cancellation fees, nor is there a minimum spend requirement. We sometimes offer longer contract durations for our enterprise customers in order to make available a dedicated concierge team, but we want to make sure that we deliver value for our customers. If we aren’t delivering value, we encourage you to terminate service.
• How do I get my free Surprise?
  Please enter your work email in the form above. One of our Alignment Engineers will reach out to you typically within 1-2 business days.