Defining the functional requirements of loyalty software needs to be done with the greatest diligence else the program could outgrow the solution within a year.
As a loyalty program is rolled out, it is not unusual for the following to happen:
If the software is not built with the flexibility to adapt to these changes, the software is likely to be criticized, even if it performs well on the functionalities for which it was built.
The components of a robust and future proof loyalty solution will typically have the following modules:
| Functionality |
Description |
System set-up and administration |
This defines the user-id and passwords of people and provides for building in access controls |
| Participant management |
Helps add retail outlets and terminals. Will also help define outlet codes and define organization hierarchy into the software. The good ones also define fraud limits. |
| Promotion management |
Where the standard rules are defined. This is where bonus points tables are set-up |
| Supplier management |
This is normally an optional module wherein all vendors including card personalization and fulfillment vendor, rewards vendors can be defined |
| Reward management |
Helps add and delete rewards categories, items, set redemption |
| Account / Card management |
The module which captures the cardholder details and enables modification of the same |
| Card production set-up |
Helps in defining card creation functions |
| Incident management |
Helps define and manage incidents including exception management |
| Transaction management |
The module which defines transactions which will be eligible for points and which will not, |
| Points processing |
This module allows setup of points earn and burn rules, validity, expiry, rejection |
| Statement setup |
Defines statement cycles across member segments and media, incorporates statement messages and inserts |
| Reporting |
Module where front-end and back-end reports are defined and extracted. Query interface to allow ad-hoc reports. |
| Customer services |
The interface for the call centre to add, modify, delete records, extract adhoc reports, manage redemptions etc. |
While features of these functionalities built into most of the current software are reaching parity, some functionalities that will need to be present to future proof the software are:
While building a loyalty solution ground up or while going in for a packaged solution one of the important requirements is to ensure how the software will integrate with current legacy systems and how it will pull/ push data from/ to these systems. This is a very important requirement and these functionalities also need to be defined upfront.
