PointLoyalty - loyalty programs online

Sometimes we are getting asked – can you change something in your system for us?

When such requests are significant - it is a subject for separate detailed discussion and building individual solutions.

But sometimes such requests are minimal and it is not so obvious whether it is worth doing changes in the system. We always try to persuade the customer not to change the product. Of course, if customer is persistent – we do modify the system for him and provide complete and tested product version. But keep in mind that system is changing constantly – we add new features, do fixes, provide additional functionality. The version that customer has became outdated – we do not provide upgrades to it – just usual support. It’s clear that main system version will continue to evolve and any product fork version gets frozen. However it is up to the customer to decide what is more important.

Continue answering questions on advanced use of PointLoyalty Manager system.
Last weeks we were often getting following questions:
1. I want to assign bonus points to my customers using your system but I don’t keep my data on your server. What should I do?
- According to our data protection policy we guarantee the non-disclosure of confidential information – see http://www.pointloyalty.com/non_disclosure.html
- Besides, you can delete submitted data using our API (http://www.pointloyalty.com/doc/rest_javadoc/index.html). After customer operation processing is finished you can immediately delete the operation from the system. You can delete the data after submitting customer transactions and also delete all the transactions for certain time interval. Same logic applies to the data of your customers.
(Pay attention that you will not be able to use operation history rules in this case since it gets deleted.)

2. Standard reports are not enough for me, I need special ones. How do I get them?
We are planning to extend a list of reports available. But even when we add more reports it is likely that some part of our clients will require specific reporting on loyalty programs.
We can offer 2 options to solve this problem: — sales@pointloyalty.com
- You can order additional non-standard reports development to out company or our IT partner — sales@pointloyalty.com.
- You can use our system API (REST and Web Services) and get all information required to make custom reports. All information – state of your programs, customer activity, earned bonus points etc – is available through our external API.

We have finished developing and testing REST-based integration subsystem. It became much easier to integrate applications with PointLoyalty Manager, especially web-based applications. In a few steps you can enrich your solution with loyalty rewards functionality.
See more details here: http://www.pointloyalty.com/web20.html
Following functionality is implemented:
- On PointLoyalty host we registered application REST resources. You can submit customer transactions online and get calculated bonuses.
- Client access libraries in Java and PHP
- Examples on how to integrate from your web-pages
- Examples on how to integrate on server side.

For example, if you are using Java on the server side of your web-application, it will be convenient for you to download our java library – you will get access to our online system for bonus calculations.
Example: http://www.pointloyalty.com/rest_java_example.html
Of course, REST API can be used not only for web applications. All applications having internet connections can use it.
From now, an integration became more clear, easier and comfortable.

We have got recently an interesting offer – to use PointLoyalty Manager for calculating employee bonus payments. Interested company has a standard set of rules for rewarding their employees. They find that formal system of charging bonuses for purchases is quite suitable for calculating extra salary payments. Besides, the system uses rules which can lead to charging negative bonuses – penalties.
We don’t know whether it is good or bad to use strictly formal method of assigning salary bonuses – the customer is always right.
However it is pleasant to note that PointLoyalty Manager is a really flexible system and customers can use it in such a way we never imagined.
So, if assigning bonus compensations can be formalized PointLoyalty Manager will solve issues like that - employee activity will be processed and bonus payments (or fines) will be calculated.

Answering questions we get in our support service from online businesses we sometimes see the difference in terminology we use.
Indeed, certain phrases like “consumer loyalty, customer retention, loyalty programs” are seldom to hear from web sites owners. More often they mention “bonuses, prizes, rewards, etc”.
We hope that all of this will not cause a muddle  and problems in understanding what our product can do. All the functionality of  «PointLoyalty Manager» can be described as follows:
-   You create rules for rewarding your customers (loyalty program, prizes scheme, etc)
-    Submit information about your customers actions (purchases, clicks, messages, …)

All the terminology questions are secondary.

How to measure the loyalty of your customers?
How to estimate your loyalty program effectiveness?
We already mentioned several times the problem of numerical estimations for established loyalty solutions.
Usually it is difficult to see exact numbers not because they are confidential but because the program owners also lack them.
One interesting way to estimate customer loyalty is by using Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric. We recommend to read about it and take a look at real business cases. Having measurable results is an important attribute of well articulated loyalty project and NPS provides a good way to achieve this.