In-Store Excellence

As we’ve discussed, your “customer connection cycle” allows you to plan the most engaging ways to stay relevant to your customers, so in this chapter, we explain the in-store options available. Clearly, our intention is to ensure that your customers continue to enjoy a quick and efficient shopping experience, with your loyalty strategy designed to add extra moments of surprise and delight.

Happy customers spend more, engage more, and recommend your store. 

Top Ten Tips for In-Store Excellence

1. Only When Relevant: With our laser focus on optimizing your customer’s experience, your loyalty program in fact has a greater role to play outside of your store than inside, building your customer connections in ways you never had before. So our first tip is to only connect with your customers in-store if it adds value to THEM. What matters most for your customers in-store is that it is easy to earn and easy to redeem. It MUST be easy for them!
2. Payment-linked Loyalty: This is perhaps the most powerful concept we’ve seen in recent years. By integrating your point of sale system with our loyalty marketing platform, your members can connect their payment card to their customer profile on our database, and then they earn and redeem their points and stamps effortlessly when they pay. Their payment card becomes their loyalty card so they don’t even need to open the app! Truly effortless loyalty.
3. Eliminate Payments In-Store with Prepayments. Our subscription-led loyalty programs offer so many benefits to customers and are particularly popular for coffee and car wash customers. By subscribing and pre-paying, in-store your members simply check out on the app when they pick up their coffee or start the carwash – and both your staff and your customers enjoy the revolutionary benefit of never needing to wait in line to pay.
4. Personalize – carefully! If your store has regular customers, it’s sometimes really nice to greet them by name. We all love to see a familiar face but it can be hard for your staff to remember everyone’s first name. Our loyalty platform can be set up to show the customer’s name on the till so the cashier can say “Hello John” if it feels right! It can make the customer really feel welcome.
5. Acknowledge Top Customers. One of the amazing benefits of a tiered loyalty program is that even new staff can immediately identify those customers who are the most loyal to you and deserve to be acknowledged differently. By showing the customer’s tier status on the till, the cashier knows when they are serving a gold member, and by mentioning this, you can make the member feel happy and special.
   
   6. Simplify Redemption and Let Members Pay with Points: Customers love the moment of redemption – when they enjoy the rewards they’ve built up over time. We actively encourage all program operators to remind their members to redeem – as this is the real “proof-point” that builds trust in your brand and ironically also increases the member’s future spend in your store too! By allowing customers to burn their points at the time of a purchase transaction, their points finally feel like cash.

7. Plan Your Offline to Online Strategy: We believe in closing the loop between the ONLINE world and the OFFLINE world and building a complete “O2O” strategy. In the offline world for example, by placing unique codes on certain products, you can invite your members to share their feedback with you. They simply scan the code and then they can “rate” the product in the app.

8. Plan Your Online to Offline Strategy: Games are a perfect way to engage your members. Using our digital platform, you can print a game code on any receipt. The member can simply scan this code in the app to get unique content. For example, if they buy a Coca Cola, they can play the Coca Cola game with a fun chance to win a free Coca Cola voucher to redeem in your store!

9. Empower Store Managers. In our experience, your program is most likely to succeed when it’s leveraged locally. You can empower your individual store managers with the ability to enjoy the full features of platform and set up local offers that are only valid in their store. Our customer excellence team can support you with the training they need to get started, and of course they can then take ownership of how their program is performing using the program as a powerful marketing tool.  

10. Always Engage Employees. There are two great reasons for creating exclusive deals for your employees in your digital loyalty program. Firstly, it makes them feel more valued and loyal to your business, improving your chances of keeping them on your team. Secondly, when your employees become active customers themselves and enjoy your exclusive employee deals, they truly experience a new way to delight their customers. This practical perspective ensures they understand how the program works for the customer at the point of sale, and they will be more likely to recommend the program and make sure their customers don’t miss out on the great deals you offer them. Truly a win-win approach.