PointLoyalty - loyalty programs online » loyalty stories

When Luxury = Loyalty

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:23:22 +0000

Good article on loyalty in luxury segment:
http://blog.colloquy.com/2011/06/30/when-luxury-loyalty
The point is that big brands do not expose bonus points and discounts to their customers, especially rich and young ones. Instead, they provide individual offers and services, close communication and privileged access to new items. There is a way to run points accounting internally and never let customers to know about it. This certainly works for luxury market segment.

Unified loyalty cards

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:25:00 +0000

Last weeks we study the following issue – why unified loyalty cards did not get widespread adoption. What we mean by unified loyalty card? It’s a card that gets accepted in every store like store’s own card. Advantages are evident – small merchants do not need to issue their own cards, larger enterprises will get a card that is a duplicate of their own one. If such card exists producers will be able to get a lot of sales analytics. All the complexities preventing widespread adoption are technical (i.e. solvable). According to interviewed experts the problem is only in “bootstrapping” such a program, involving several major retailers and attracting vendors of equipment (POS terminal, RMS, software). Despite the number of obstacles we get an impression that the thing is doable.

Create custom ratings using PointLoyalty Manager

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:41:00 +0000

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.

An interesting idea for shop owners

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:40:00 +0000

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”.

When internet connection is lost

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:39:00 +0000

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.

SaaS and protection of environment

admin — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:03:00 +0000

We have discovered recently an interesting view on advantages of using SaaS software – see article «SaaS v. on-premises Software: Which One is More Green?».
The author claims (with numbers and calculations) that using SaaS solutions in your business help you reduce global energy consumption.
We never thought about this aspect of on-demand computing but we found it encouraging – we do useful things in terms of our global environment protection!

Non-standard use of PointLoyalty bonus processing system

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:00:00 +0000

We already wrote about one of our clients idea to use PointLoyalty Manager for calculating bonus points for company employees.

Another interesting idea from our customers is to use PointLoyalty Manager as a system for computation points for a gaming web site. Players registered on this site get bonus points according to complex and frequently changing rule system which also consider previous players’ achievements. We don’t know yet if our collaboration will be successful, but this idea is quite interesting.

Our system was intentionally designed for wide application spectrum and looking at non-standard usage ideas it looks pretty much universal.

Integration with financial applications

admin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:55:00 +0000

Researching PointLoyalty cooperation options with existing financial applications we discovered that not that many companies are really ready for online integration despite the claims of having open architecture, easy integration, plugins support, etc. Some companies provide a list of add-ons implemented by third-party developers which in many cases lack production quality. The term “open architecture” is also understood differently from vendor to vendor.
But there are some nice exceptions. Most often they are relatively young firms who need to design their products at the highest level to get advantage over existing competitors. These young companies do not need to support compatibility with earlier versions and eager to use new technologies. We believe these young players will define the future of technologies open for integration on SaaS market, if large competitors will not buy them out.

Discounts or Bonus Points?

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:51:00 +0000

In books on marketing it is possible to find a lot of materials why bonus points are better then discounts. There are also many comments from customer loyalty experts on according internet web sites. But our clients ask us quite often – why do you offer only bonus points system, we want to get a flexible enough discounts.
For PointLoyalty Manager it is absolutely not relevant how you use calculated bonus points. You can name them “calculated discounts” and redeem them as you want. If you are working with PointLoyalty Manager in online mode you can use bonus points to reduce total amount of each customer’s receipt.
Everything depends on rules you define in the system.

Loyalty programs in B2B sector

admin — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:37:00 +0000

Many people think that loyalty programs do not work or, at least, not much useful in B2B market segment. They claim most important is personal relationships with the partners especially when you work together for a long time. This is true while you have several or at most few dozens of clients. When client base grows there is an evident need for automation. It is not possible to hold in your head the history of interactions with hundreds of your partners.
PointLoyalty Manager makes it possible to create formal rules for rewarding best of your clients based on the history of your relationships. Assign bonus points to your clients for closing specified amount of deals during certain timeframe in the past. Give them discounts for purchasing certain amount of a particular item during all time of your partnership. Assign negative bonuses to clients who decreased purchasing activity…
With PointLoyalty you have endless options to reward your partners paying attention to their partnership record.
To be continued…