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Seattle Startup: TangoCard Announces Salesforce Integration

Imagine if you could integrate actual gift giving into your Salesforce CRM system. Go beyond birthday and anniversary reminders and actually send a gift. That’s now a reality thanks to Seattle based startup TangoCard.

Salesforce integration for the Eric Schmidt, Innovation Endeavors, backed startup is just one on the features TangoCard has been working on this summer.

Once the user installs the TangoCard for Salesforce app, giving a contact a gift is as easy as finding that contacts name and hitting a button.

After installing the free app, just look up a contact or lead, choose a card, write a message, and hit send. Gift card options include the Tango Card as well as digitally delivered gift cards from major retail brands including Starbucks and Fandango. Through a partnership with Treat, sending a beautiful physical greeting card also becomes as simple as sending an email. Additionally there is “zero-click” integration with Concur Technologies. For any purchase made with a linked Concur® account, a receipt image for any purchase is posted directly to an open Concur expense report. This integration finally creates a simple way to properly expense and account for enterprise gift card purchases.

Now there’s no excuse to miss a present or for forgetting a follow up gift.

“Sales teams, customer service teams, recruiters, and others spend over $10 billion annually on gift cards, and many of these teams also use huge SaaS platforms like Salesforce,” says David Leeds, CEO and Founder of Tango Card. “We created this dedicated Salesforce app to dramatically simplify the process of buying a gift card. Perhaps more importantly, doing this through Salesforce empowers teams with great business intelligence and real power to follow-up on cards they have sent. It also provides a slick way to complete holiday gift card purchases.”

TangoCard announced a partnership with Denver startup Plink, to widen the reward choices for their platform which prior to that, dealt only in Facebook credits. Both companies announced that partnership in June.

Last month, TangoCard announced a partnership with Portland startup Hively to reward employees for great customer service.

While the SalesForce announcement is quite exciting we’ve got it from a good source that TangoCard will have even more news between now and the end of the year.

Linkage:

Check out TangoCard here

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Portland Startup Hively Teams Up With TangoCard To Reward Great Customer Service

Last week when we brought you our interview with Hively co-founder Jason Lander, we knew we were going to hear an announcement regarding a partner for customer service rewards. Now we hear about rewards startups all the time and loyalty and rewards programs. Hively is a little different, they’re taking the responsibility for a great customer service interaction back into the providers hands. Quite frankly, the way it should be.

Customer service is the number one driver of loyalty. It’s what turned Sprint around when Dan Hesse took over. It’s why I stayed with T-Mobile for years (not anymore as their customer service slid), it’s why I try to stay at Drury when I can. All of these companies have had superior customer service. In fact, several studies have shown that customers will pay a premium, or maybe a little more for a product or meal from a place where they know they are going to receive great service, than go for a deal with places that have bad customer service.

Customer service and rewards for good customer service are the foundation for Hively.

In our interview Lander told us that they were soon going to unveil a way for customer service people to redeem points from good one click reviews. Now we’ve found out what the customer service people can do with the points. They can get “stuff” from TangoCard’s network of retailers.

Three things happen in the Hively model:

A customer service agent focuses on their quality of service using the incentivized program. This way, even in non commissioned sales environments, agents and sales people can earn something “more”,and it’s not even based on a sale. With the improved customer service the sales will flow in, just ask Sptrint.

A customer service agent/sales rep will encourage customers to use the one click method of rating their service. They obviously want their points and the establishment wants the feedback.

Sales are driven by better customer service.

We love startups that turn an industry on it’s head.

“We believe that the right rewards given at the right time will drive significant and valuable results,” said David Leeds, CEO and founder of Tango Card. “We’re excited to partner with Hively to source and fulfill their program requirement for digital rewards.”

“Hively has always been about gathering and measuring customer happiness,” said Jason Lander, co-founder of Hively. “Since virtual rewards can quickly lose their appeal, our customers have asked for a way to more tangibly recognize colleagues and top performers. Our partnership with Tango Card is the perfect solution.”

Linkage:

Hively is here

TangoCard is Here

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Denver Startup: Plink Teams Up With Tango Card

Seattle startup TangoCard continues to make news. Just last week we reported that Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, had participated in a $1.8M round of funding for TangoCard through his Innovation Endeavors investment arm.

Today loyalty and rewards startup Plink has announced a partnership with TangoCard that will take their 35,000 merchant rewards network from Facebook credits, to a plethora of great opportunities for redemption. Now in addition to earning Facebook credits that can be used for hundreds of Facebook apps and games, customers in the Plink reward network can also earn credit towards top merchants like Amazon,Home Depot, Target,iTunes,The Gap, Nike and many more.

“Our members have asked for more choices and we’re excited to expand the innovative ways they can earn rewards for eating and shopping offline,” Peter Vogel, Plink’s co-founder and President said in a statement. “Plink’s goal is to bridge the gap between online consumers and their offline purchases and partnering with Tango Card makes that vision more rewarding for our current members and attractive to new ones. We still believe in Facebook and Facebook credits; we wanted to increase our reach and exposure.”

Tango will also handle all of the work involved in the gift card part of the program.

“Plink and Tango Card are rethinking how consumers want to earn and use rewards,” David Leeds, CEO and founder of Tango Card said in a prepared statement. “Tango Card carefully curates digital rewards to deliver a complete program in a card. This approach allows Plink to focus on their core business: creating an innovative online-to-offline loyalty program. We are huge fans of what Plink is doing and are delighted that Plink selected our easy SDK [software development kit] to integrate the Tango Card.”

“We were looking for new ways to advertise all over the Internet and through Facebook, not just to people that are playing games on Facebook,” Vogel added. “We had seen Tango out in the marketplace. They have a lot of the biggest and most popular brands that our members want. Tango Card provides our members with a one-stop stop shop with an easy entry point. Tango also has a mobile application that enables our members to pick the [electronic] card they want on the go. It’s a very appealing model. For us, it’s all about choice.”

Just last week Tango received a $1.8 million dollar series A round. They said at that time they would use the fund for expansion, hiring more developers and expanding their proprietary software applications. Obviously they are moving quickly toward that goal.

Linkage

For more information on Plink visit this link

For more information on TangoCard visit this link

Source: Press Release via Loyalty360

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