A common suggestion is to first monitor late or incomplete shipments, these are viewed as the greatest cause of customer dissatisfaction. In spite of the importance of on time and accurate delivery, very few organizations have any idea about their record in this particular area. It is suggested that organization should begin by measuring the time between the offered delivery time and when the product actually arrives.

Also it is a good idea for the company to monitor customer complaints, disputes, returns, and claims. The organization will need to keep in mind that data will be enabling them to monitor an changes in order frequency as well.

Once the problems of these departments have been identified and noted the organization can then take steps to prioritizing the process improvements according to the areas of greatest concern. Often even slightly cutting down on customer defects can have a huge affect on profits.

Business Intelligence applications make relevant information easier to obtain, this makes it possible for organizations to generate customers for life by increasing the rate of customer satisfaction. Also due to the increase in customer satisfaction an organization will experience greatly improved cash flow partially due to payments no longer being delayed by claims and disputes.

The main group of our customers is small and medium business companies, which cannot afford the development of their own bonus programs, and either didn’t use them or were involved into coalition programs.
Primary market – retail (10% of the total number of loyalty programs participants), including e-trade, social networks and communities that need flexible systems of rating calculation.
Global market – USA ($1.2 billion on loyalty programs support in 2003, $2 billion- in 2009), also Europe– about €1.5 billion. In e-trade the approximate world expenses on loyalty programs amount to $200 billion.

Current status

SaaS service of PointLoyalty is fully developed and available in Russian and English versions.
Currently, we are improving the service features and entering into cooperation with partner companies:
• Technology companies: such as a company, involved in SMS informing, POS, RMS systems developers.
• Partners involved in product promotion: SaaS marketplaces, system integrators, marketing agencies.

Investments

Investment money will be focused on the following areas:
1. Product development:
• Accounting systems integration.
• POS terminals and RMS systems integration.
• Add support for coalition loyalty programs.
2. Promotion, advertisement.
3. Office, technical support, equipment.

The main problems faced by small and mid-size companies when implementing loyalty programs include:

• High price of software offered by software development companies ($0.5-2 million), or the need to create their own processing systems for bonus programs.
• Lengthy time until the launch of the program. New development takes about 1 year, setting up the current one takes no less than 6 months.
• All existing solutions offer a limited number of bonus schemes, essentially repeating the discount models and not taking into account customer types and history of relations with the customers.

Solution and technology

SaaS service of PointLoyalty Company is a solution of the above problems. SaaS service is a universal system which allows you to establish the rules of the program and, based on these rules, to calculate bonuses for loyalty programs’ clients working for small and medium-sized enterprises.

SaaS solution from PointLoyalty Company is a service fostering the new generation of customer loyalty programs. This software has the following properties:

• Availability – the full featured standard edition of the service is free of charge.
• Usability – it takes 20 minutes to create a new version of the running loyalty program.
• Flexibility – the system is operated by marketing specialist and supports all necessary rules to stimulate customers’ purchasing activity with no IT department involvement.

Competitors

• System integrators doing customization and deployment of ready solutions for loyalty programs (e.g. – Manzana Loyalty) or in the development of custom software (e.g. – Vesdia, Comarch). These integrators hold a high price bracket which is not our priority for the first three years.
• Companies offering simple, pre-defined systems for bonus calculation to loyalty program customers (e.g. – StickyStreet). The functionality of our solution considerably exceeds the functionality of such competitors.
• Software designed for POS systems (standard discount systems, simple bonus programs) is not suitable for e-trade and doesn’t focus on customization.

Business model

The following represent a number of ways for the service monetization:
• Charge for the technical support.
• Subscription fee for full featured system.
• License sales if the system is used in customer’s network.
• System integration with client’s software.
• Consulting.

The main competitive advantages of our Company:
• It takes minimum time to start a project – without administrative delays the running program startup takes a few days.
• Free of charge use for small projects and for any type of projects in the implementation and testing phase.
• Easy integration with external applications – support for online data transfer (REST API, web services) and significant data volumes (data files downloading, transfer via FTP etc.).
• Ready made module for communications with members of loyalty programs (view bonus points, see offers and promotions).
• Scalability – supports cluster computing.

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.

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.