How loyalty kiosks can help retail relationships

Loyalty programme sign-up kiosks can help retail marketers to plan, establish, execute, and maintain a loyalty programme that's easy for consumers to join and use, and simple and affordable to manage and operate.

According to Capture Resource, one of the key problems in administering a productive loyalty programme is encountered at the very beginning of the process, during customer enrolment:

• Processing paper enrolments can be both costly and inaccurate;
   
• The process of the customer filling in the form takes counter staff's time, and the consequent entering of the data into the system from the form takes yet more time;
   
• While the actual loyalty cards are often issued at the time of enrolment, the identity of the holder is sometimes not known to the system for weeks or even months;
   
• The costs involved become a significant cost of managing the programme;
   
• Inaccurate and incomplete enrolment data can result in undeliverable mail and customers that are unable to be contacted. If incomplete or incorrect data finds its way into the system, it largely defeats one of the main objects of a loyalty programme: to make best customers feel special.

The company asserts that a kiosk-enabled sign-up frees up customer service operatives, allowing to devote the time to their core duties. While the actual is often lower than that of traditional paper processing, it is the intangible savings that make the biggest difference, the company suggests. For example: self-service customer profile updates; issuing a paper-based temporary card for the customers who have forgotten their cards; and enabling card replacements for customers who have lost their cards.

Capture Resource's own kiosk-based enrolment system requires no POS interface or connection, and the customer enrolment data is transmitted immediately to a customer loyalty database application. This then performs additional cleansing and checking of the data, such as automatic householding and duplicate card number checks. Marketers can then send a personalised "thank you" within a day or two of signing up.