This week’s CUSTOMER roundup is about loyalty solutions, or those platforms and services that enable companies to create a lasting bond with their customers. Here are the companies that responded to our call for submissions on this topic.
AppCard is simplifying customer retentions. We help retailers build a true and transparent relationship with their shoppers – a relationship that entices behavior and results in the increase of recency, frequency, and monitory spend. AppCard offers brick- and-mortar retailers a totally new concept of making real-time, item-level data actionable, while requiring no integration with the PoS to drive customer retention and loyalty – combining a multi-tier loyalty program with actionable data analytics reports and business intelligence insights resulting in personalized offers and rewards. As a cloud-based platform, whether the retailer has 25 locations or 500 locations, it gets to view the entire business, all on a single dashboard. It helps users understand their transactions data, product mix, employee performance, manage their campaigns, or track shoppers by shopper purchase history, demographics, and locations – visited all the way to the individual receipt level. We enable retailers to communicate with their shoppers, anytime, anywhere. Before they visit to the store we allow for mobile app and web accounts. As they conclude their transaction, we support digital live receipt. And as the shopper leaves the store, we enable push notifications, text, and e-mail campaigns. Our shopper smartphone app increases stickiness, making offers more visible to shoppers and drawing more customers back to the store.
Historically, implementing a customer loyalty program has entailed either setting up a punch card or mag swipe card solution. The prospect of introducing a state-of-the-art branded mobile-enabled CRM loyalty and rewards system is a daunting and costly endeavor requiring custom integrations, software programming, and extensive testing and training. Chances are, if you weren’t a Fortune 1000 company, you pushed this idea to the side. AppSuite has transformed this paradigm with its 360° Mobile Marketing solution. The solution offers loyalty, 1-to-1 marketing, gift cards, offers, events, ordering, and social media into a friction free solution to increase profits and customer satisfaction. Naturally, simplicity for general staff and customer use is the icing on the cake. The secret behind the success of this solution is its seamless integration between the mobile app, iPad Loyalty Manager, and payment processing. AppSuite has partnered with BluePay, a leading payment processor, to create this contemporary approach to automatically issuing and redeeming reward points and mobile offers that works in harmony with existing point of sale systems. The solution is affordable as well since it’s built and offered via the SaaS (News 
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Capillary Technologies is a provider of cloud-based, software solutions that enable retail marketers to quickly and easily manage their customer data, gain insights, and personalize engagement across social media, mobile, e-mail, online, and in-store channels, driving a significant increase in sales and loyalty. Customers include industry leaders such as Benetton, Marks & Spencer, Puma, Pizza Hut, and Luxottica. The Capillary Loyalty Manager helps you manage your loyalty program and increase enrollment through an easy sign-up process with the flexibility to collect data from a store, online, a tablet, or elsewhere, and manage it all in one place. Retailers can increase sign-ups with a quick, virtually form-free, mobile or card-based sign-up process that has proven to increase registrations. Capillary also has a 15-second mobile sign-up process that encourages high customer registration rates. Once combined with Capillary’s customer big data analytics platform, which integrates data from multiple sources to obtain a unified view of the customer including complete understanding of customer behaviors, buying patterns, and preferences, you can use these real-time insights to design a loyalty program that rewards and incents members to continue to visit your store, increasing sales with personalized offers.
Designed to help brands maximize the value of their most important asset – their customer, CFI Group’s technology platform combines ongoing monitoring of customer feedback with proprietary analysis tools that deliver insights for action and help businesses thrive. This platform, the Omnichannel Retail Barometer, includes three integrated suites and a supporting toolset, creating a one-stop solution to monitor, analyze, and act effectively to customer feedback. The first of Barometer’s suites, CF Monitor, helps all types of organizations listen to customer feedback through multiple channels, including brick-and-mortar locations, call centers, and websites. The second suite, CF Analyze, allows organizations to measure key drivers using intuitive, ad hoc analysis tools that make information available in real time. Finally, the third suite, CF Workflow, provides organizations with the tools to turn insights into action using closed-loop resolution. All the suites are supported by CF Workbench, a toolset for organizations to build effective surveys, manage samples, and preserve the privacy and security of their data and information resources.
ei3 (Electronic Industrial Internet Information)
The ultimate customer loyalty solution may be the ability to help customers anticipate and avoid problems before they occur. The Remote Monitoring Cloud from ei3 enables machine-building companies to offer their customers a loyalty program that provides secure remote service access with each machine they ship. In addition to providing predictive failure alerts (saving the seller 80 percent of start-up and warranty trips), the program provides the end customer with key performance indicators and automatic replenishment capabilities, increasing both uptime and productivity. By offering their customers the ability to derive actionable insights not only from their machines, but the data they produce, ei3’s Remote Monitoring Cloud creates a mutually beneficial long-term business relationship between the machine builder and the owners of their equipment. This program, which can be white labeled with the equipment manufacturer’s brand and loyalty program name, strengthening customer relationships. The Software-as-a-Service offering allows for flexible subscription, enabling the machinery company to deliver advanced Industrial Internet Services to its customers while concentrating their focus and resources on core competencies.
Suited for any company looking to build brand loyalty, Nuance Nina is an intelligent virtual assistant from Nuance Communications (News - Alert). Nina is a digital persona who delivers personalized, effortless customer service via a human-like conversational interface. Nina can be the ambassador for your brand, the all-knowing guide to your content, or the reassuring voice of your customer service organization. Nina not only knows who you are but what you want, and delivers that information through a natural, conversational interface. Nina combines speech recognition, natural language understanding, and voice biometric technology to deliver an unprecedented customer experience by turning a consumer’s mobile device or a website into an engaging customer service assistant. Nina allows customers to quickly and intuitively serve themselves and get immediate outcomes – whether they’re paying a bill, getting a question answered, or simply looking for information. Nina establishes brand loyalty by expressing the brand’s attributes through persona, differentiating the company from competitors by delivering the missing attribute in self-service – the human touch. This heightened level of personalization and human-like connection has a significant impact on consumer perception and behavior, making customers more likely to view a company favorably and motivating customers to come back to a website or app again and again to get the outcomes they need.
Paytronix provides restaurants with industry-leading reward programs, e-mail clubs, promotional engine, gift and comp solutions, and data insights that compel guest behavior. Paytronix offerings optimize social, mobile, and database marketing technologies to deliver reward programs centered on the fundamental goal of creating loyal guest behavior and to predict and drive incremental sales while providing an experience that brings guests back again and again. Paytronix continues to enhance its advanced mobile “chassis” compatible with the latest iOS7 and Android (News - Alert) (News - Alert) 1 platforms. Mobile apps can be branded for each restaurant as is or used as a base for a completely customized app. Recent upgrades include mobile payment, virtual wallet, geofencing, mobile check-in and social referrals. Paytronix also allows users to extend marketing activities to the local store level to achieve a more relevant connection between a national brand and its local guests, send messages in real time triggered on specific purchases, such as LTOs occurring at the PoS, and deliver more timely messages complete with redemption reporting. Taken together, these mobile, social, and messaging capabilities give restaurants and retailers a centralized way to identify customers and initiate the on-going, one-to-one communications that are crucial to driving business today.
Loyalty isn’t solely about cards to monitor purchasing behaviors and points to deliver rewards. Loyal customers are created when organizations leverage customer data and feedback to drive change in a business. The ResponseTek (News - Alert) Listening Platform is an end-to-end customer experience management solution. Scaling to meet the needs of enterprises, the Listening Platform delivers transactional customer experience insights that are linked to specific interactions and employees. This equips companies to take the action required to save at-risk customers and improve overall customer experience. The collection of, and action on, customer feedback makes it clear that a business values its customers’ opinions, and that lip service isn’t being provided. In post-call back surveys, customers have shared how excited they were that someone from the organization called them back, or how surprised they were someone actually read their comments, etc. This is a large win not only for the customer, but also for employees to see value in their work. Once loyal customers have been created, they can become brand champions, promoting products or services via social media or taking advantage of refer-a-friend incentives.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
