PointLoyalty - loyalty programs online

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!

Let’s try to figure out when using our hosted onDemand PointLoaylty Manager system is not suitable for a customer and when he might choose to install the system on his local servers:

1. Big amount of loyalty offers running at the same time (dozens and hundreds of offers), especially when offers employ historic rules and large tree-based custom categories.
To ensure system performance it is better to provide exclusive computing power for enterprises of such size. Contact our sales department sales@pointloyalty.com to buy a license for PointLoyalty Manager local installation.

2. Top secret transaction data. If passing the data through SSL channels with encrypted client identifiers is not secure enough for you – consider installing the system on your local secure network.

Every such case needs to be negotiated separately – please contact our sales department for more details.

We refined PointLoyalty Manager integration system. Clients can send their data using SSL channels to calculate bonus points earned by their customers.
PointLoyalty REST API remains unchanged. To utilize SSL connections one needs to access REST resources using according protocol:
- HTTP Demo Resource - http://www.pointloyalty.com/wl/rest/demo?login={name:demo, password:demo}&!output-type=XML
- SSL Demo Resource - https://www.pointloyalty.com/wl/rest/demo?login={name:demo, password:demo}&!output-type=XML

Pay attention that if you are using web browsers for viewing demonstration REST resources you need to manually add our website to the list of SSL allowed sites.

Client libraries (Java and PHP) were refactored to support SSL connections (Beta release issued). Take the latest version of client libraries from our site if necessary.

We ourselves have partially answered our own question about the fears of companies rejecting new loyalty programs because of financial crisis.
There is no data on other regional markets but on American market loyalty programs are booming despite recession in other sectors.
California state statistics: During last three months amount of coupons used grow 3 times compared to last year results. More and more consumers pay attention to any option for cutting spending or getting customer rewards. I.e. it means there are three times more people who want to participate in customer reward programs. Of course this client activity is not what initially waited from loyalty programs since in theory they target fedup and not scared consumer. We can see that despite financial crisis there is a big demand for such marketing tool as customer loyalty program and this gives us a hope for better times.

Everybody these days heard about worldwide financial crisis and its impact on the real economics. What it brings to marketing and customer loyalty reward programs?
Any financial turbulence naturally hit luxury market segment first. Buying things which are not necessary for your daily life can be postponed to a better time. But people have started to cut spending on things which were common to buy during stable years. Car sales, for example have declined by 20% comparing to the previous year. So, step by step, people reduce consumption, companies reduce spending and cut investments. There is a fear that organizations will cut most marketing efforts in particular deployments of customer loyalty programs.
Indeed, if crisis is here for a long time – many companies will fight for the survival and skip optimization of working with customers to retain the best of them. On other side some companies may decide to completely cut budgets on required modernization, automation, etc. People responsible for the budget planning can think following: we lived without this for 100 years; we will live without this next 100 years, nothing bad happened. If time to tighten the belts will come soon – such viewpoint has the right to existence but if the situation is not so bad we think it is better not to cut such important efforts. Reasonable investments are important for keeping the business running even in tough times.