The general report on the development of PoitnLoyalty Manager system of client loyalty record

REST / Web services
1) SSL support for REST API.
2) the methods of creation of loyalty program users’ accounts have been added.
Now the owners of loyalty programs may:
- provide their users with logins/passwords — offline business.
- create accounts automatically - online business.
User console (the system of notification of loyalty programs users)
1) It is given the example of user console placement on the site of an owner of the program.

2) It is added the possibility of full customization of «User console» for customer’s needs
- Support of Company’s logotype.
- Support of application’s form (CSS).
- Support service’ address has been changed.
(See Pointloyalty Manager “Registration page”)
3) the utility for adjustment of application’s form has been developed

4) The detailed description of integration process with “User console” has been added. The given description contains the detailed examples and recommendations on the application’ using.
http://www.pointloyalty.com/member_console.html

To resume — the possibility of full integration of widget “User console” with your sites has been added.

The future plans — to provide with plugins for integration with support systems of e-commerce.

Calculating bonus points. Track sequence of customer’s purchases.

One of the most interesting features in «PointLoyalty Manager» system is ability to take into account the history of purchases of your customers.
1. Most easy case of charging bonus points – for current purchase. I.e. while calculating bonus points the system analyzes total cost of purchase, amount of items, date and time of purchase and whether purchased item belongs to a certain category. Sometimes it is sufficient to use only such simple rules.
2. When you have full customer base you also can create rules based on customer’s attributes such as gender, amount of family members, age, educational status, etc. These loyalty rules are more seldom to see in implemented loyalty programs. Major obstacle – you need to have full customer base with all details filled. Sometimes it is difficult to gather all this information and keep it intact.
3. Most flexible utility – rules tracking the sequence of customer activity or history rules.
You can assign bonus points to customers who did something specific in the past. For example – give bonus points if customer has spent certain amount in your shop during last week. You can even create negative bonus rules to ‘punish’ customers who decreased their purchasing activity.

«PointLoyalty Manager» provides very flexible system for bonus calculation rules and you can create almost every rule you can imagine. Start with simple rules and remember, if you will need complex ones, it will be very easy to create them in the system.

Source: http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/03/19/calculating-bonus-points-track-sequence-of-customers-purchases/

Program member’s notification

Assume, you created a customer reward program in our system and after processing real transactions you have got bonus points charged to member accounts. What’s next?

It is required to notify program members about earned bonuses and provide a way for them to browse the history of purchases and received bonus points. Your client should see that bonus calculation system is absolutely transparent. Bonus points do not appear from nothing and will not disappear suddenly.
We provide 3 ways to notify your program’s members:
1. You add a link on your web site to our special member console application. Your clients will get all relevant information using our online application hosted on our site. This does not cost you a dime – just put a link to our application to your web site.
2. You want to create an application yourself providing some additional functionality like notifying clients using SMS. In this case costs of development depend on your requirements. We provide API to get the data from our system. Please contact us support@pointloyalty.com to get help on integration issues.

3. You don’t have a web site and you don’t need it at all. Just let your clients know the link to this page http://www.pointloyalty.com/member.html and tell them that your company is our partner. Your loyalty program’s members will be able to browse their bonus points directly from our web site.

We are ready to discuss any additional requirements and ideas on notifying on the system of your member’s notification.

Source: http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/02/26/program-members-notification/

Loyalty on demand.

Software itself and approaches to work processes automation are changing every year. Nowadays, additionally to traditional custom software development and deployment of existing automation systems it is possible to add a new type – renting software.

Usual terms used to describe software rent:
SaaS – Software-as-a-Service
SoD - Software-on-Demand

There are evident benefits for the customer: making project start cheaper, payment for real usage, reducing costs and resources required for installation and support, predictable schedule of payments, etc.

This approach is also rational for software vendors since it allows penetrating new markets easier. On a global scale SaaS is not a new thing and it is late to speak how this approach revolutionizes the industry, but it is too early to say it became commonplace.

At current time the crisis will probably push some companies to use SoD. It is hard to live without further automation and the path for cutting costs will force companies to search for new solutions. We expand our services exactly in this direction. So, if you think about ‘loyalty on demand’ solutions, you are probably our future client.

Source: http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/02/24/loyalty-on-demand/

Working with PointLoyalty Manager

After getting familiar with PointLoyalty Manager system, all the future work can be nominally divided into 2 major steps:
- Setup application according company business details and create loyalty programs and offers – tasks for marketing staff
- Setup data transfer channels to periodically transfer all information required to process customer bonus points – tasks for IT people
We already wrote about the first step and will cover this theme in future posts.
Regarding the second step – our bonus calculation system is build in such a way that if you have full base of client transactions specific for your type of business (list of client purchases, orders, etc) – automation of data transfer will not take longer then 1-5 days. (We don’t count the possible problems in communication between marketing and IT departments in large companies).

In case you don’t have IT personnel (for example you outsource IT tasks), we can help with this step or we can recommend our partners to solve this small problem.
Please pay attention that this is not our core business and we are not going to take all software development work in your company – we only help you to speed up your loyalty programs start.
Source: http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/03/02/working-with-pointloyalty-manager/

Loyalty programs and the financial crisis. (Continued)

We ourselves have partially answered our own question about the fears of companies rejecting new loyalty programs because of financial crisis.
There is no data on other regional markets but on American market loyalty programs are booming despite recession in other sectors.
California state statistics: During last three months amount of coupons used grow 3 times compared to last year results. More and more consumers pay attention to any option for cutting spending or getting customer rewards. I.e. it means there are three times more people who want to participate in customer reward programs. Of course this client activity is not what initially waited from loyalty programs since in theory they target fedup and not scared consumer. We can see that despite financial crisis there is a big demand for such marketing tool as customer loyalty program and this gives us a hope for better times.
Source: http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/01/19/loyalty-programs-and-the-financial-crisis-continued/

Loyalty programs and financial crisis

Everybody these days heard about worldwide financial crisis and its impact on the real economics. What it brings to marketing and customer loyalty reward programs?
Any financial turbulence naturally hit luxury market segment first. Buying things which are not necessary for your daily life can be postponed to a better time. But people have started to cut spending on things which were common to buy during stable years. Car sales, for example have declined by 20% comparing to the previous year. So, step by step, people reduce consumption, companies reduce spending and cut investments. There is a fear that organizations will cut most marketing efforts in particular deployments of customer loyalty programs.
Indeed, if crisis is here for a long time – many companies will fight for the survival and skip optimization of working with customers to retain the best of them. On other side some companies may decide to completely cut budgets on required modernization, automation, etc. People responsible for the budget planning can think following: we lived without this for 100 years; we will live without this next 100 years, nothing bad happened. If time to tighten the belts will come soon – such viewpoint has the right to existence but if the situation is not so bad we think it is better not to cut such important efforts. Reasonable investments are important for keeping the business running even in tough times.
Source: http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/01/16/loyalty-programs-and-financial-crisis/

What are bonus points

After finishing the first version of PointLoyalty Manager product and www.pointloyalty.com web site our employees started to send links to it to all their friends in order to get impressions and critical comments.

The majority of answers were of the following type: “Great, I like this! But what are the bonus points?”
Of course, our product is designed for marketing people and customer loyalty specialists. But the fact that significant part of people does not know about bonus points surprised us.

Let’s try to find formal definitions of Bonus points term.

Definition from the Wikipedia:
Bonus - something extra that is good.

For marketing area and loyalty programs issues we can formulate the definition of “Bonus point” term as follows:
Bonus points – abstract points given to clients for customer operations which can be later converted into some kind of rewards.

Simple example – 50 bonus points to everyone purchased video equipment from June till August on weekends.

3 major issues coming out of this definition:
- Bonus point – unit for measuring client loyalty in some form. I.e. more bonus points client earns – better reward we must prepare for him since loyal clients have more value for the company.
- Bonus point – delayed reward and it is not necessarily a discount. This gives much more flexibility for your marketing force.
- Unlike discount cards bonus loyalty programs are more complex. As in example – we tried to reward clients for expensive purchases during low sales season.

Summarizing, we can say that bonuses is more complex but, in the same time, more flexible tool for raising client interest in working with your company.
Source: http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/01/11/what-are-bonus-points/

Loyalty blog

With this record we open a series of posts about customer loyalty programs.

We are going to collect all related information and give our own view on the problem of building effective bonus loyalty programs and different aspects of their technical implementation.

We have our own solution for managing loyalty programs - you can take a look at www.pointloyalty.com