PointLoyalty - loyalty programs online

There is a new release of PointLoyalty Manager bonus loyalty management system coming out next week.
New version features better and wider support for web developers.
In addition to already implemented Web Services there will be REST-based integration support (see Representational State Transfer).
The new release with enhanced integration options is an important step to broaden the audience of PointLoyalty system users. We believe it will become much faster to integrate our system with your online internet solutions. You will be able to add bonus reward programs support in a matter of hours.
Detailed description, examples and sample REST resources will help you solve your tasks faster.
See more details after the release.

Sometimes we got questions of the type: Why should I choose PointLoyalty Manager for managing my loyalty programs? What are the benefits and why you are better then other loyalty solutions’ vendors?
Here is a short answer. Our major advantages are:
1. Time to start a project
2. Simple setup and integration
3. Pricing model
4. Flexibility
Let’s briefly explain every point:
1. Time to start a project. Time is a treasure and only you can estimate how precious your time is. According to our estimates you need to spend:
- 15-30 minutes to make first impression and brief system overview.
- One full day to study the system in full details, create sample programs and pass the trial data to calculate bonus points.
- 1-2 days to prepare real customers’ data and careful set up of the loyalty programs and offers.
2. Simple setup and integration. We already have several posts on this issue and will not write more on this here. Please send all your questions to our technical support service.
3. Our pricing policy. Here, everything is evident – use the product for free or pay a small fee for extended capabilities. Since we support SaaS (software-as-a-service), you don’t need to your own data center and associated administration costs. If you plan to abandon your loyalty programs it is very easy to cancel your support subscription.
If you worry much about data safety it is also not expansive to set up the server in your secure local network.
4. Flexibility - a potential to create almost any kind of bonus calculation system in any kind of business. People wonder why we have such complex and flexible system. They say:
- We only need to grant bonus points for buying items more expensive then 100 USD. We don’t need anything more complex then that and our IT department can easily solve this task.
We answer:
- OK, but soon you will want to extend, refine or add something to it. In this way you will start developing your own system. Do you really want to do it, is it your core business? Even if you will always have simple conditions for charging bonus points – we already have it implemented. Use it for free from our web site or get better support for a reasonable monthly fee.
To be continued ….

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.

I watched staff turnover situation in one (not so big) company. There was no turnover in it since very long time. After one of the leading managers has left the company employees started to quit thick and fast. I talked to one the former employees:
- Why did you left ‘ZZZ’?
- The salary was way too low
- How long this situation lasted?
- 1.5 years
- Why didn’t you quit earlier then?
- There was such a special atmosphere in our department…

I tried to understand what methods were used by their former manager but have not heard anything besides small corporate parties, organizing outdoor events and other simple casual strokes which were not cancelled after the manager departure.
Later I talked once again with people from that company. There were indeed no special actions taken by the manager to support employee loyalty. It was simply his charisma – he was open, loved his colleagues and tried to support friendly atmosphere in the company.
It is often enough to use common sense when working with people. Treat your employees and clients same way as if you were in their position and they will be loyal to you at least. All the other technical tricks of loyalty programs – are only a supplements to the most important – humane relations.

Let’s re-iterate over evident things once again
- Why companies establish customer loyalty programs?
  - To reward their loyal clients.
- Why companies abandon simple discount programs?
  - Discounts are impersonal.

Why then it is a very often case when rewards in bonus loyalty programs come to impersonal gifts listed in catalogues of doubtful goods taking valuable place in warehouses?
As we already wrote an issue of proper rewarding customers is one of the most important issues in organizing customer loyalty programs. Be creative when choosing how to do bonus redemption. It is not enough just to calculate bonus points; more important is to properly convert them into valuable rewards for your customers.

One interesting example:
One chain retailer in Russia has established a usual bonus loyalty program but added one interesting feature. Before the New Year holidays they send to all customers who gained certain amount of bonus points a special VIP card which allowed to avoid standing in long queues days before the New Year. They opened a separate checkout counter for owners of VIP cards. The chance to spend much less time doing necessary purchases was a major driving force of this program believe it or not.

So, think twice when you organize bonus points redemption – be creative and avoid giving your customers only option to choose from dull catalogues of unsold items.

We already mentioned in the post (http://www.pointloyalty.com/blog/2009/02/24/loyalty-on-demand/) dedicated to ‘software-as-a-service’ why this approach is not yet very popular. Besides all issues described we can list some additional obstacles: the fear to disclose company’s sensitive data and business processes automation reluctance as it is.
Both obstacles will disappear with time.
Let’s see an example from ERP software sector. Many companies think about full business process automation but complain about high costs of ERP solutions. Nowadays there are several well-established open source ERP projects which can dramatically reduce the costs associated with deploying company automation software. But there are a very small number of open source ERP installations worldwide. The statistics show that all on-demand ERP vendors take only few percents of the global market.
We can see that largest companies choose very expensive solutions from SAP, Microsoft and Oracle. Other companies do not want to solve the issue despite they need to.
Our solution is not as big as ERP. We only provide a solution for loyalty programs management and bonus point’s calculations support.
And you can choose – to install our software in your network or use it from our website on terms Software-as-a-Service .

After taking part in discussions on forums it appeared that people have different understanding of ‘loyalty’ term. Here we try to list some of definitions

Customer loyalty can be defined as a positive attitude of customer towards a product, brand, retail shop, service, etc

Loyalty – unresponsiveness to offers from competitors

Loyalty – readiness to sacrifice something in order to continue relationships. If there is no readiness to sacrifice – there is no loyalty. Loyal employee is ready to sacrifice his time or extra efforts on workplace. Loyal customer is ready to spend some time in queues or pay little bit extra, etc. If one is going to make some recurring purchase because of the good price – he is only practical in his decisions, but not loyal. If there is no readiness to sacrifice - there is no loyalty.

Loyalty – is a trust of a regular client + his trust ‘on credit’ (we he can excuse some discomfort in order to continue cooperation). So, the level of loyalty = level of trust on credit.
Meaning of loyalty – Company intentionally invests in its buyers trying to minimize risks from its own errors, which can influence company’s market position.

Loyalty of a customer (supplier) – customer (supplier) readiness to take certain damage to continue business relations.

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.