Loyalty programs exist in many shapes and sizes. They can involve points-based campaigns, cashbacks, tiered campaigns, premium loyalty campaigns, and so on. Apart from handing out rewards for buying their products or services, these forms of campaigns have something else in common: they usually involve a lot of back office work. Think about checking proof of payment (receipts, invoices etc.), updating a client database, determining and attributing loyalty points, and more. If you want to run more cost-effective loyalty campaigns that have short turnaround times and more engagement, automating is the way to go. In this blog, we will explain how automating the back office works for your loyalty campaigns.
Jump to:
What steps are taken in a loyalty campaign?
What is BPO and why is it relevant to loyalty campaigns?
What is BPA and why is it relevant to loyalty campaigns?
Why automate your loyalty campaign processing?
Which steps of loyalty campaign processing can be automated?
How are loyalty campaigns automated?
Want to find out how automation can help you?
What steps are taken in a loyalty campaign?
There are a lot of steps to take when you set up a loyalty campaign. We’ve named a couple in the introduction, but let’s take a look at a more extensive list of tasks:
- Set up the campaign
You start with determining what products you wish to promote and how many points or other rewards you attribute to each purchased product. You can also set up conditions for participating merchants, for time periods and what the earned points can be used for.
- Receiving proof or purchases
You need a way to let customers send in proof of purchases, for example receipts or invoices, and when necessary temporarily save them in the cloud so that you can process them. - Return illegible or fraudulent photos to the customer
You can either send a request for a higher quality photo or filter out those with criminal intent. - Maintain a customer database
Proofs of purchase need to be coupled with a customer profile, so that you can actively personalize the experience. You need to know who has sent in the receipt or invoice.
- Read every single document
Next to receiving the document, you need to know what exactly is on it. This can be done by human eyes, which would be an enormous amount of work. But it can also be automated.
- Confirm campaign product on the receipt
Is one of the perhaps many line items on the receipt part of the campaign? Then you need to confirm it in combination with a confirmation of the participating merchant, time and date on the receipt, and other campaign conditions. - Determine how many loyalty points should be attributed
The amount of points needs to be linked to the campaign conditions in the previous step. - Attribute loyalty points to customer profile
You’ve confirmed the bought campaign product and the amount of loyalty points. It’s time to pay what is owed. The customer can now spend it where and how they wish.
Each and every step of the way will cost you time and resources, especially when you have inhouse employees who constantly perform the administrative tasks and security checks regarding the proof of purchases. Now you’re possibly thinking: ‘I’ve already outsourced this back office work through BPO years ago!’. Though this might have been the most cost-effective and time-saving solution back then, there are even better ways of doing this. Why not change BPO into BPA?
What is BPO and why is it relevant to loyalty campaigns?
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a way for businesses to have all business processes done by an external workforce. Say you’re in a business that requires a lot of nagging administrative tasks, it might be way cheaper to outsource this work to a low-wage country or via an online community such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Loyalty campaigns are such ventures that need a lot of administrative work, as summarized above. Having such simple and repetitive tasks outsourced is of course much cheaper than having your pool of employees extended. You’d lose more money on wages, rent of office space, taxes, and other costs of employment. There are a lot of benefits here, aren’t there? Perhaps it’s time to take a look at an even more effective solution.
What is BPA and why is it relevant to loyalty campaigns?
Business Process Automation (BPA) is the process of letting a computer perform certain business processes for you. Artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed to such a stage that you can now fully rely on its capabilities in not only doing the administrative work, but also tasks that require decision making. A well trained AI will be more effective, will never be on sick leave, doesn’t take up office space, doesn’t take holidays, and so on. You can simply set up the process that needs to be automated and the job will be done.
Along with the benefits mentioned for BPO, applying BPA to your loyalty campaigns will increase accuracy of repetitive tasks that might cause a human employee to lose focus. What’s more, the speeds with which these tasks are done is much higher. Accuracy, speed and reliability are but a few of the major benefits of BPA. So replacing BPO with BPA is definitely something to consider.
Why automate your loyalty campaign processing?
The world is moving steadily towards the automation of all simple administrative tasks, so it’s important not to fall behind. AI is at a level where you can enter campaign conditions, have photos of receipts sent in, and have all requests processed fully automatically. Through an API such as Klippa’s, you are able to deploy an AI to do tedious back office tasks for you. Of course, outsourcing also means that the work is done for you, but what exactly are the benefits of this form of BPA as opposed to BPO? Here is the, by no means exhaustive, list of automation benefits.
Cost-effective loyalty campaign management
As all back office operations are automated, you won’t need to pay employees or outsourcing offices to do it. The AI is more accurate and will cost you less in correction when errors are made. And most of all, it saves time and as we all know: time is money!
Fast processing of administrative back office work
Every uploaded document, such as a receipt or bill, is processed in a matter of seconds. This means that you can receive thousands of documents on a daily basis and hand out loyalty rewards safely and securely within seconds, rather than in 24 or even 48 hours.
Increase revenues by scaling to larger campaigns with higher volumes
Automation allows you to easily scale up your operations to either a larger audience or running multiple campaigns at the same time. Improving your scalability will also increase revenue, so you can up your game.
Improve customer satisfaction
On the customer side, the speed and reliability of automated processing will come highly appreciated. Plus, automated processing frees up time and resources for customer services. An easy-to-use program with extensive service, what more could a customer need?
Prevent fraud on loyalty campaigns
Our API solution is also able to detect photographic manipulation or repeated requests on the client-side. When there is image tampering, the API will refuse the request. This will potentially save you a great amount of losses.
GDPR / privacy compliant
The rules and regulations around privacy in the European Union and elsewhere are getting stricter by the day. And so they should! Thankfully, we can guarantee that our automated processing is done completely by the book. We do not save any customer data, but we simply return information. Besides that, we can set up our server infrastructure on any location of choice. For example in Amsterdam, London, Hamburg or the US. That makes Klippa entirely safe to use and always according to local regulations
Which steps of loyalty campaign processing can be automated?
Earlier, you already read about all the steps taken during an effective loyalty campaign. Well, which of these steps can be automated and how? Well, all administrative steps can be automated, but more importantly, you can choose which. The API can do the following by itself:
- Optimize photo of document to ensure good quality input
- Determine the merchant on a document
- Determine the date of a document
- Determine the total amount of a document
- Read line items on documents
- Categorize information on documents
- Extract all or specified information from documents
- Determine validity of the document
- Recognize fraudulent content
- Link data on document to campaign conditions
- Determine loyalty score
- Attribute loyalty points to customer
When cashback is applicable, the API engine can also determine the amount of cashback due. You can also fully automate each step of cashback campaign processing. So for instance, the steps of clearing and payment are also part of the service.
As you can see, artificial intelligence is able to liberate you of all administrative tasks in the loyalty process. You only need to determine for yourself which product or audience you wish to target, and to determine what the conditions and rewards of participating are.
How are loyalty campaigns automated?
You probably already own a website, app or another platform through which you can receive the photos or scans of the documents, such as receipts, invoices or bills. If you don’t have one yet, then that’s the first step to take. Set up a platform through which the customer could participate in your loyalty program. Automating your loyalty campaign processing is as simple as implementing Klippa’s Camera SDK or OCR API. We offer the Klippa Loyalty AI, which can do the following:
- Use our Camera SDK, which uses blur and glare detection to automatically determine whether the photo is legible enough for processing.
- After the photo upload, the photo is read using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which can recognize which pixels on the photo are text and determine what it says.
- The resultant text is then extracted into a simple, dry TXT-format.
- Our extensively trained AI determines the context of the text and automatically searches for overlap in the relevant lines on a receipt.
- The resultant data is transformed into a JSON-format, which gives items context.
- The contextualized items can then be linked and confirmed with your campaign conditions.
From the first step with our camera SDK up until the confirmation of items on the receipt with campaign conditions, from A to Z this process is supported by a reliable, top-notch AI. It has been trained extensively with numerous examples of receipts and can extract text with more than 95% accuracy. All steps are linked with the API, which takes in the uploaded photo and presents the contextualized output. Your loyalty campaign processing is now fully automated.
Want to find out how automation can help you?
If you would like to learn more about how Klippa’s loyalty campaign automation can help speed up your business processing and improve your loyalty campaign processing, please get in touch. You can reach us via [email protected]. Alternatively you can plan a 30 minute demo during which we explain how our software works and how it will benefit your organization.