The Emergence of Modular Loyalty Technology
Adopting Loyalty Technology, specifically Loyalty Management Systems (LMS) has always been a complex task. Despite the emergence of API driven and cloud-based technologies, most brands still evaluate adoption or upgrades of LMS like they do other enterprise solutions. There are weighty requests for proposal (RFP) documents to draft and the decision-making process can be extended over many months.
The approach still seems to ring with the words “rip and replace,” in other words moving to new technology seems like a binary decision, moving from one to another, with little efficiency of resources created in the process.
As Wise Marketer CEO Bill Hanifin states in this new eBook from Exchange Solutions, “The dilemma is this – there’s an “urban myth” in loyalty technology that for retailers to advance their solution capabilities and keep pace with customer demands, their first, maybe only, option is to “rip and replace” their entire loyalty platform in order to accomplish their goals. This way of thinking is foolish and no longer applies, as a broader set of options are available to extend capabilities and meet consumer expectations.
Wise Marketer has been exploring innovative approaches to Loyalty Technology adoption throughout the year. In May, we interviewed Scott MacDonald and Jen Hickling, two executives from Exchange Solutions on how to use Modular Loyalty as a “plug and play” approach to enhance loyalty program capabilities while minimizing risk. You can listen to that conversation here.
We’ve published two other articles you will find as good reading on this topic, one from White Label Loyalty here and another illustrating two retail case studies from Exchange Solutions, a Luxury Men’s Fashion Retailer and a National Pharmacy Retailer.
To coalesce all of this good thinking, we recommend you read the comprehensive eBook Revolutionizing Customer Loyalty: The Emergence of Modular Loyalty Technology. This eBook is a well written piece that educates how the transformation of thinking about a re-platform or “rip-and-replace” project shouldn’t be the first or only option to consider and how Modular Loyalty solutions can be leveraged with success. You can download the eBook here.
We have some smart people in our network (thanks, Chuck Ehredt) who like to describe this topic in the framework of micro-services. Regardless of the terminology that you choose to use, it is clear there are opportunities to be more nimble, efficient, and cost conscious as you add capability to your loyalty program platform.
