In today’s competitive retail environment, the battle to retain customers is fierce. The winners are those who establish and maintain one or more competitive advantages in the minds of their customers. A Loyalty Program is a powerful way to create a compelling reason for your customers to prefer your business over another. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

With Loyalty Cards in their wallets, your customers are much more likely to choose your company the next time they make a purchase.

Points for purchases
The first step in creating a Loyalty Program is to decide what point value to assign to customer purchases. You can assign points per dollar spent, or multiples of one dollar, or divisibles of one dollar. The system can also tally customer transactions for purchases and assign points per purchase (frequency). For example:
One dollar equals five points.
Five dollars equals five points.
One dollar equals ten points.
One purchase equals ten points.

The Loyalty receipt
The terminal prints a receipt which tracks the points added to the customer’s Loyalty account and provides a total for all points accumulated to date and available for redemption (point balance). To eliminate confusion, no previous redemptions are shown.

Terminal functions
Activation: Activates a new Loyalty Card as a programparticipating card.

Purchase / Sale: Amount of the purchase at point of sale.

Void: Voids a current day transaction

Balance Inquiry: Obtain Loyalty point totals from account database.

Deactivation: Remove card account from the Loyalty system.

Redemption: Cardholder can redeem an Award at point of sale.

Totals: Merchant can obtain total points for the same or previous day.

Terminal applications
Most of the same terminals and applications that process Stored Value / Gift Card transactions can also be set up to process transacitons for the Loyalty Program. The Tranz 330 and 380, (the 460 is Stored Value / Gift Card only), the Nurit 2085/3000, Hypercom applications are processor specific. PC Charge, a windows based software application, can process all of your credit card needs as well as all of the Valutec transactions. Valutec has a touch screen capable software application that can process all transactions while installed in any windows base computer or POS System. Integration with other terminal applications and POS systems are in process and being evaluated.

Reports
The system will provide reports indicating loyalty points earned through purchases, a summary of redemptions, transactions voided, balance inquiries and other activity relative to that merchant’s program.