Customer Rewards

Rewards are very powerful, we have stopped offering any affinity dscounts (BMC, BCU, BC, National Trust and all the other bodies that don't promote our business but seem to give their members a sense of entitlement to a discount). We offer a more generous level of reward points than the default setting and with some customers this really seems to work. However, there are a couple of areas where if we could customise the settings a little more, I believe we could make this a more powerful tool. 1) Online, we get customers who buy a single heavily discounted item with free shipping, a day later they buy another, taking the reward points from their earlier purchase and applying those to another item (often the same as the one they bought the day before) and we incur two lots of postage. If we could set a custom period of delay for when the points hit their account, we may be able to get that customer to buy both in the first purchase and because they now have twice as many points, they come back to buy from us again in the future. I'm thinking that I would set our system at 14 days. I think that's just long enough to prevent them exploiting the loophole, but not long enough that they've forgotten about us. It's also better than Tesco who give you your points quarterly. 2) Active accounts, we currently have our accounts set with points deactivating after two years (again we looked at Tesco and the lifespan of their vouchers), but we get customers who want to "rack up" their points saving them for a "big purchase". If we could set it so that the points don't deactivate if the account has been active in the previous 12 months, or two years, then these customers could theoretically build their points over a prolonged period. In some respects this could be a win/win for us as retailers with the value of the points accrued effectively decreasing as prices go up with inflation, equally we wouldn't have to be checking expiries and reinstating points that have expired because the customer has let them rollover for too long. If they're a regular, then the last thing we want to do is alienate them by telling them they've lost their points. Just a couple of thoughts I had, I'm interested in hearing other folks opinions?

We would like to see more of a gap between the purchase date and the time in which rewards are redeemable. Most dealers have a 30 day return policy so it seems reasonable to have rewards cycle 31 days after purchase. We were using The Bike Cooperative's system prior to migrating to CPOS and that worked well. It also seemed like more customers came in ready to make a purchase using the rewards, rather than it being pleasant surprise at checkout.

If a customer pays for something using customer rewards or another type of tender set to zero miltiplier, but tops up the balance using a debit card the system gives points for the full ammount. The customer rewards system needs a complete overhaul.

Please can we have a reason field when issuing points for customers, to keep track of customer service related issuing of points etc

Is it me, or is the user experience to add or take away points on a customer record in admin unnecessarily complicated? We don't need a slider, we don't need a toggle between slider and input box, we just need a simple box to input a figure in or take points away with a - and a submit button. The way it's designed seems like a triumph of design for design’s sake over UX. Trying to add any points to the box the figure keeps resetting too, so you have to type in then cursor back to take the default digits away?!

It would be great to have customer get bonus points for following our social pages, Facebook Instagram ect. Seem to be a very common feature on other platforms and would drive engagement.

If they're added automatically, surely they can be removed automatically?

We are debating getting plastic customer rewards cards made. Its a)plastic and b)people simply dont like carrying loads of rewards cards around, and their physical demise is well reported on news channels regularly. Customers DO use phone based rewards cards. I just looked and I have 6 on my own phone. So how about a digital customer rewards card? Yes an element of this can be done anyway looking the customer up, but they process of handing the QR code over to be scanned reminds customers of the loyalty scheme, and we can look up a customer quicker using it too.

It would be good if there was a way to alter how often the customer rewards balance emails are sent out.

So for example, we want to run a promotion with triple points on a brand for one weekend, but we have some clearance items from that brand on sale with 30% (or more) off, giving triple points on that transaction is great for the customer, but we make nothing and potentially lose money on that transaction. The secondary filter at present only seems to allow me to include items, not exclude them. A tertiary "negative" filter for exclusions could be useful in making rewards an even more powerful tool for driving sales.