Last
weekend, in preparation for my Yelagiri trip with my wonderful team, I was
cleaning my bag. I took out my purse; I could find more than 10+ cards in it.
These are in addition to my Credit and Debit card. What are those cards? Loyalty
cards J In Wipro, employee’s loyalty is
shown by the color of the tag they wear (Blue, red and Green), similarly our
retail stores also distributes Loyalty cards which is their way of attracting
customers.
During your
purchase, you will be asked for your membership card and if you have one, you
will be getting few credit points which can be redeemed during your subsequent
purchases. My purse had 10+ such cards: Big Bazaar, Titan, Pantaloons, Landmark,
Naturals!!, Mega Mart, RMKV, Pothys etc. the list goes on like this.
I was just
thinking why we can’t have one Loyalty card across all the retail stores and
each retail store can tie up with that Loyalty card vendor. This will eliminate
the need for manufacturing so many cards and having separate software to manage
them. This will also benefit the customers to simply carry one card when they
go for shopping.
This Loyalty
card vendor can have software to track the points earned by the customer for
each of the retail store separately. In the retail store when you swipe that
card, they should be given access to data which is relevant to them alone,
which means if I swipe my card in Titan, they can access my data related to purchases
and points earned from Titan and no data related to Pantaloons will be visible
to them. Software should also have feature to add a new retail store.
Gone are
those days, when we used to carry money for shopping. Now each transaction is
using card (credit or debit). The new problem is about carrying too many (Loyalty)
cards. Will there be a solution to this also soon?
Cool...See some one is listening :). PayTM & Payback are a few set of examples...
ReplyDeleteI am not clear Laxmi, PayTM is all about online payments right? And Payback is having very few like Big Bazaar, Pantaloons and ICICI others are all online shopping. Won't it be great to have all in one??
DeleteJust to add, though I had a Payback card, I was asked to get a separate card in Pantaloons. Could not get a clear answer from them.
DeleteAs we know, these cards have the objective of keeping customers loyal. To ensure this they provide you with a "loyalty" card and come up with redemption schemes / discounts / points etc.
DeleteHence there are two parts of the puzzle -
1. Brand identity related to the cards
2. Redemption of value from the cards
If you generalize the first one, their identity gets diluted, means the very purpose branding is defeated, hence the brands don't join hands.
The second part is only encashment, which is generic and is available in the form of Payback etc.
This is purely a business technique. I also have some cards. But for one of the cards I had renew the membership every year. For that I had to spend a minimum amount in a particular month. They used to put discounts on that month too!! And... I m also doing it every year as it is a cloth store for all.
ReplyDeleteIf we are going to have 1 card for all, they can't do this technique. So retailers won't do it.
Yeah Veena, but most of them doesn't come with renewal. These Loyalty cards are just used for tracking your purchase and the points you gain.
DeleteYeah Veena, but most of them doesn't come with renewal. These Loyalty cards are just used for tracking your purchase and the points you gain.
Delete