What to Look for in A Boot Program

Corporate work boot programs are one of the best ways to provide quality footwear for your employees, as we indicated in our basic guide to setting up a boot program. This guide could be considered "part two." We'll go into more detail about how to set up or modify a boot program well‒suited to your company's particular needs. This guide assumes that you already know the basics of a boot program or have been involved in setting one up in the past.

Most of this guide concerns questions to ask and details to consider when evaluating vendors. Setting up a boot program is one of those things that seems pretty straightforward, but there are many variables that may not be obvious at first.

Fundamentals First: Vendor Experience, Reputation, and Support

No matter what industry you're in or who you're doing business with, basic alignment of values, goals, and business practices between the two parties is the most important consideration. Start your search in broad and general terms by asking questions like:

• What are some of the unique needs and pain points workers have in my industry, and which boot vendors are best equipped to solve those problems?
• Which vendors are most well‒known and liked in my industry? (Be sure to compare apples to apples here, especially if the vendor serves several different industries; construction workers and industrial electricians have different footwear needs.)
• If I must choose between experience and innovation, which is more important to me (and my employees)? Given my needs, do I want to work with a vendor who has done the same thing successfully for a long time, or does it make more sense to take a chance on a new vendor who is boldly experimenting in the name of providing a better product or service?

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of questions to ask—just an indication of broadly important things to think about.

The quality of the vendor's customer support—both to you and to your employees, if applicable—is especially important, and it becomes increasingly more important the larger your company is. Ask prospective vendors detailed, focused questions about how their customer assistance process works when you or your employees need product support, returns, exchanges, and so forth. One of the most important (and most overlooked) questions is: How easily can I (or my employees) get direct, one‒on‒one assistance from a knowledgeable helper if we have a problem that can't be easily solved through normal channels? Today, one trend is arguably clearer than ever: The companies that have the best reputations for customer service are those that are happy to offer personalized, one‒on‒one support when needed. (Consider how many times you've been treated like a faceless ticket number in a company's customer support system and then consider whether you're eager to do business with those companies again.)

Quality and Diversity of Products

Even if you only need or want boots, it's worth considering whether a prospective vendor might also be able to make your life easier in other ways. A common complaint among workers in many industries is that they must use several different websites to order all the gear they need. This can get especially complicated (even logistically aggravating) in some cases.

If you provide any combination of uniforms, footwear, personal protective equipment (PPE), or other job‒critical gear to your employees, choosing a vendor who can provide all of that in a single program could greatly streamline your administrative tasks and make your employees happier.

Consider one potential pitfall with an all‒in‒one vendor, though: The more products and services a single company offers, the more difficult it is for that company to keep quality and service high in all those areas. This is not to say that it's impossible or that a vendor's size always has an inverse relationship to the quality of their products; it's just a general correlation to keep in mind. Often, you can find a sweet spot wherein the vendor is large enough to meet most or all your needs but small enough to maintain high levels of product quality and customer service.

Another common way to add value for your employees (and to make your own life easier) is to work with a vendor who can customize products before shipping them to their end users. In many industries, workers are responsible for ensuring that their uniforms have the appropriate patches and name tapes or are otherwise customized according to company requirements. Leaving this responsibility to each individual worker eats up a lot of man hours and risks inconsistent quality. (Plus, employees are generally happier with fewer compliance tasks on their plates.) There's a good chance that you can save time and money in the long run (and improve worker satisfaction) by offering embroidery, screen printing, monogramming, and other customization services directly from the vendor.

Website Functionality and Ease of Use

Here, by "website," we mean wherever you and your employees go to order boots from the vendor, which could also be downloadable software. At minimum, this should be:

• a dedicated company portal with unique logins for you and all your employees;
• easy to navigate and use without requiring more than minimal tutorials or orientation, and;
• consistently reliable (at least 99.9% uptime).

Also important are the logistics of placing orders and making payments, especially if you offer full or partial vouchers to your employees. These vouchers are generally loaded into each employee's account automatically and don't require the use of codes or coupons, but legitimate exceptions may exist. The important governing principle here is that at least 80% of your employees should be able to navigate and use the site easily without major confusion or the need for human assistance beyond a basic tutorial. (Some percentage of employees will always have trouble, especially in larger companies, but 80% self‒sufficiency is a good minimum goal to shoot for.) From the employees' perspective, ordering boots and other equipment through the portal should be as easy and painless as placing an order on any reasonably well‒designed e‒commerce site.

Reporting, Billing, and Other Admin Consideration

All businesses are driven by data analysis to some extent, and easy access to complete, well‒organized data is vital for large companies. Ensure that the vendor you choose offers hands‒off reporting, meaning: You can access, view, and download important information about your employees' use of the program without needing support staff (yours or theirs) to do it for you.

It's not only the ease of accessing the data that matters; being able to get a clear and accurate picture of the numbers is one of the most valuable ways to gauge whether and to what extent your employees like the program and find it useful. If most of your workers are using their boot program benefits successfully and consistently, that's a good sign that the program is meeting their needs, and the reverse is also true. Detailed data can tell you a lot; for example, if many employees are starting orders but not completing them, that suggests some kind of problem with the checkout process.

A good boot program is also easy and painless for you to manage. For instance, consolidated, automatic billing should be an easy ask if you plan to offer full or partial vouchers. Automatic enrollment, tracking, and disenrollment of employees via integration with your payroll system is another huge time‒saver, especially if you have hundreds of program beneficiaries. Spend some time thinking about your biggest admin pain points and ask the vendor which ones their boot program could address.

Setting up a new boot program or changing to a new one isn't hugely difficult, but it does require some pre‒planning and careful thought if you want to ensure that the program is a great fit for both you and your employees. We hope this guide has helped you in the right direction. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out to our team.