Loyalty programs come in many forms—points-based rewards, cashback, tiered memberships, premium perks, and more. While these campaigns are great for boosting customer loyalty, they all share a common challenge: substantial back-office work.
From verifying proof of purchase to updating customer records and calculating loyalty points, managing these tasks can be time-consuming and costly. To run more efficient loyalty programs with faster turnaround and higher engagement, automation is the solution.
In this blog, we’ll explore how loyalty automation can help your business enhance customer engagement and drive business growth.
Creating a successful loyalty program involves multiple steps. We’ve mentioned a few already, but here’s a more detailed breakdown of the essential tasks involved:
- Set Up the Program: Start by selecting which products to promote and assign the points or rewards tied to each purchase. Define conditions for participating merchants, timeframes, and how customers can use their earned points.
- Collect Proof of Purchase: Establish a method for customers to submit their proof of purchase, like receipts or invoices. If needed, temporarily store these documents in the cloud for easy processing.
- Filter Out Unusable or Suspicious Entries: Ensure high-quality submissions by requesting clearer photos when necessary and filtering out potentially fraudulent entries.
- Maintain a Customer Database: Connect each purchase proof with a customer profile, enabling you to personalize their experience and track engagement.
- Process Each Document: Analyze each document to identify relevant details. While this can be labor-intensive if done manually, automation greatly simplifies this step.
- Verify Campaign Items on Receipts: Check that the purchased items on the receipt align with campaign requirements, such as confirming the merchant, time, date, and other conditions.
- Calculate Loyalty Points: Based on campaign rules, determine how many points each purchase earns.
- Credit Points to Customer Profile: After verifying the details, credit the customer’s profile with the appropriate loyalty points, which they can redeem as they choose.
Each step consumes time and resources, particularly if in-house teams handle the tasks manually. While you may have outsourced this to a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) provider in the past, there’s now an even more efficient option: transitioning from BPO to Business Process Automation (BPA).
What is BPA and Why Does It Matter for Loyalty Programs?
BPA enables computers to handle various business tasks, including those requiring decision-making. With advances in artificial intelligence (AI), automation can now take on both administrative and complex tasks. A well-trained AI system delivers efficient, error-free performance without the limitations of sick days, vacations, or physical office space.
In loyalty programs, BPA provides several key advantages beyond traditional BPO. It increases the accuracy of repetitive tasks, minimizing the risk of human error due to fatigue. Additionally, BPA operates at higher speeds, completing tasks quickly and reliably. The accuracy, speed, and dependability of BPA make it a strong alternative to BPO—one worth considering for streamlined loyalty program management.
The 6 Benefits Of Loyalty Automation
With administrative automation becoming the norm, staying competitive means embracing AI to handle campaign tasks efficiently. By using an API like Klippa’s, you can set campaign conditions, receive receipts, and process requests—all automatically. While outsourcing can handle these tasks, here are key reasons why BPA is an even more effective choice over BPO:
Cost-Effective Campaign Management
Automating back-office tasks eliminates the need for dedicated staff or outsourcing agencies. AI’s accuracy reduces error costs, saving both time and money.
Rapid Processing of Documents
Every receipt or invoice can be processed within seconds, allowing you to manage thousands of submissions daily and issue rewards almost instantly instead of within 24-48 hours.
Scale Loyalty Programs to Boost Revenue
Automation lets you seamlessly expand your loyalty programs, reaching larger audiences or running multiple initiatives simultaneously. This scalability enhances your potential revenue and supports campaign growth.
Enhance Customer Satisfaction
Automated processing speeds up response times, making the loyalty experience seamless and reliable for customers. With more resources available for customer service, you can provide a user-friendly program with attentive support—delivering exactly what customers need.
Prevent Fraud in Loyalty Programs
Our API can detect manipulated photos or repeated submissions, flagging tampered images and denying fraudulent requests. This added security helps prevent significant losses from fraud.
Ensure GDPR and Privacy Compliance
Privacy regulations, especially in the EU, are increasingly strict, and we take compliance seriously. Our automated processes do not store customer data; they only return the necessary information. Plus, we offer flexible server location options, including Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, and the US, ensuring local compliance and data safety with every transaction.
Which Steps of a Loyalty Program Can Be Automated?
As discussed, a successful loyalty campaign involves multiple steps. The good news? All administrative steps can be automated, and you have the flexibility to choose which ones to automate.
Here’s what our API can handle:
- Optimize Document Quality: Enhances photo quality to ensure clear and accurate data input.
- Identify Merchant: Automatically detects the merchant on the document.
- Determine Date and Total: Extracts the date and total amount from each document.
- Read Line Items: Scans and records individual items on receipts or invoices.
- Categorize Information: Classifies data for easy processing and reporting.
- Extract Information: Pulls specific or complete details from each document as needed.
- Validate Document Authenticity: Confirms the document’s legitimacy.
- Detect Fraud: Recognizes tampered or suspicious content.
- Link to Campaign Conditions: Matches document data to campaign rules and conditions.
- Calculate Loyalty Score: Determines points earned based on campaign criteria.
- Credit Loyalty Points: Adds the earned points to the customer’s profile.
For cashback campaigns, the API can also calculate cashback amounts and handle processing and payment steps automatically. Each part of the cashback flow, from clearing to payout, can be fully automated for a seamless experience.
As you can see, AI can handle all administrative tasks in the loyalty process. All that’s left for you is to decide which products or audiences to target, along with setting the campaign conditions and rewards.
How Does Loyalty Automation Work?
To automate your loyalty campaign, start by ensuring you have a platform—like a website or app—where customers can upload photos or scans of documents, such as receipts or invoices. If you don’t have one, that’s the first step. This platform will serve as the gateway for customer participation in your loyalty program.
With that in place, automating your campaign processing is straightforward using Klippa’s SDK or API.
Here’s how Klippa Loyalty Automation handles it:
- Camera SDK: Our Camera SDK uses blur and glare detection to verify photo clarity, ensuring legibility before processing.
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Once the photo is uploaded, OCR technology scans and recognizes the text within the image.
- Text Extraction: The identified text is extracted into a simple TXT format, creating a structured output.
- AI Contextual Analysis: Our AI, trained on vast examples of receipts, interprets the text, detecting relevant line items on the receipt and adding contextual details.
- Data Transformation: The processed data is converted into a JSON format, enhancing each item with context and relevance.
- Condition Matching: The contextualized data is then matched against your campaign conditions, confirming eligible items.
From initial photo verification with our Camera SDK to final confirmation of receipt items against campaign rules, every step is driven by our high-accuracy AI, which achieves over 95% text recognition. All stages connect seamlessly via our API, ensuring a smooth, automated process from start to finish.
How Can Loyalty Automation Help You?
If you’re interested in how Klippa’s loyalty program automation can accelerate your processes and optimize campaign management, we’re here to help! Reach out to us or book a 30-minute demo via the form below to see our software in action.