PointLoyalty - loyalty programs online

Let’s talk once again on integration simplicity.
After you make yourself familiar with PointLoyalty Manager bonus programs management system (this can take a bit more then 20 minutes) – you will need to decide how to pass the consumer transactions data into the system.
If you need online data processing, your programmers need to pass the data as follows:

ValueBean val1 = new ValueBean();
val1.setName(”sum“);
val1.setNumericValue(3800);

ValueBean val2 = new ValueBean();
val2.setName(”product“);
val2.setNumericValue(”printer“);

ActionBean action = new ActionBean();
action.setMemberId(”customer card for John Doe“);
action.setName(”purchase“);
action.setValues(new ValueBean[] { val1, val2 });

return action;

From this example you can see that
- “John Doe” has made a “purchase” of a “product” named “printer” and spend “sum” of $130.

In your information system there is a record of this purchase, so there should be no problem in passing this data to PointLoyalty Manager.
(Encryption, data protection, local installations of the product are out of this blog entry scope)
Full description of the integration mechanism.

We like reading discussions where people argue that loyalty software is a secondary thing to worry about – this statement indirectly advertises our product.
Using Pointloyalty Manager sets you free from software concerns at the start of customer loyalty programs and it is bound to our following advantages:
- simplicity
- wide functional support
- short time to start
- free or low-cost price policy

It is better to spend marketing budget on specialists managing loyalty offers, not to develop your own software solutions.

Software is indeed secondary, don’t waste your precious time on it – use our system.

At first glance the importance of social networks in promotion of your goods or services is really overrated.
Major drawbacks:
- Promotion specialists – almost all of them behave non-professionally and lack basic skills
- Groups – the most important mechanism to organize “fun clubs”. In practice it is hard to navigate there, they are full of spam and advertisements. Looks like they were created only to spend customers money.
- Virus videos – people send it each other only to have fun. It is doubtful that anybody will ever remember the brand which was mentioned there

We don’t want to challenge the importance of social networks and their future potential in promotion of your brands\services but right now we see the situation in a way we described here.

Last few weeks we were actively studying existing business applications for social networks. If the result of our research will be interesting – we will publish a separate post on it.
It is already evident that there are not that many marketing applications designed for social networks. Software developers could not create applications which could be interesting enough for network participants. Few existing applications could not spread widely among users – virus marketing did not work for them. So, preliminary summary – despite the common agreement on importance of representing business needs in social networks, such representation is very basic at the moment – only specialized groups and few applications with embedded promotions.

Let’s make one more attempt to explain what PointLoyalty Manager actually does.

PointLoyalty Manager let’s you create rules for processing user actions and compute according bonus points
- on a base of user action itself
- on a base of user characteristic
- on a base of user previous activity (actions performed prior to current date)

Computed bonus points are then added to user accounts and the sum on one’s account represents how loyal the user is to the company.

Examples of using our system in real life:
- Computing bonuses – in real time mode.
- Computing discounts – in real time mode (calculated amount gets subtracted from total price amount )
- Discounts – delayed calculations
- Maintaining user ratings – delayed calculations

Theoretically there are much more applications, but we will keep listing real-life examples here.

We already mentioned several times that PointLoyalty Manager can be used not only for tracking bonus points in loyalty programs. It can be also used for maintaining various user ratings for internet resources such as social network sites, forums, etc.

It is often not really necessary to process all user actions immediately online (despite PointLoyalty Manager does not put any limitations for such use). More frequently it is enough to refresh the ratings once per day.

In this case the internet resource owner need to setup Cron task sending user activity record for past time period. The server load will be distributed better. Other way to improve site responsiveness is to send actions after user logout.

Being on a conference in a place where usually spend vacation time…
One of the local companies demonstrated an interesting technical solution for solving next problem of internet shops:

Some company announce that it is ready to sell certain product at X price instead of standard Y – if the whole stock of N product items will be bought at the same time.

Then the customer is involved into getting N buyers of the product for this company, not only the company itself.
Of course, the program can be much more complex – the price can depend on the date, one can define a limit for price decline, there can be various options to handle purchase refusals, but the essence is this: “Hey, customer, let’s get those N other buyers and you will get the product cheaper”.

What will happen if the internet connection will be lost? This is one of most frequent questions we hear from our customers who are interested in our online product version.
Our answer – nothing bad will happen. It is of course not very good that customer transactions will not be processed immediately but we believe that it is not fatal for the business – the calculations will take place later. When network connection will get restored – transactions need to be sent once again (this moment must be considered during the integration process).
We can see 3 categories of system robustness according associated costs:
- No additional integration – transactions data is getting lost when the there is no connection to internet
- Keep customer transactions and send them once internet connection is restored.
- Allocate backup internet connection channel – absolute robustness.

How expensive is the loyalty program and how fast it is possible to start it?

Marketing forums novice members always ask such a question and never get a straight answer. This happens because it is impossible to give answer not asking in turn – what exactly you plan to do?
Here are some issues you need to take into account.
Time and human resources must be spent on:
- study previous experience,
- choosing strategy,
- training personnel,
- adopt customer care procedures,
- order, install and setup support software,
- educate employees to use the software,
- establish channels for rewarding customers,
- etc

Further it depends on you.
If your company is a big clumsy monster – you’ll stuck in months of official red tape. If your company is fast and mobile – everything is not that ugly.
It is easier to establish such programs for companies working in online business sphere.
Their advantages are mobility, technically advanced personnel and high initial level of business automation.

When our solution is used as a technical platform for creating bonus points based loyalty programs – pilot version of the system can be launched within one week timeframe.

Sometimes our critics say we are cheating – you create software for calculating bonus points based on complex set of rules. But accruing points to customers’ accounts is not what loyalty program term means.
We agree with what they say – loyalty program is much then what our software does. We provide only a tool which we believe is essential piece in loyalty programs set of tools, techniques and management efforts. We say it short in a slogan on our web site “Loyalty programs online” to avoid lengthy titles. One should understand we provide only a tool to reach one’s goals – we do not provide an entire loyalty program solution.