The Loyalty Switch – A Case Study On Innovating at The Pump
As more organizations look to enhance reward programs with new functionality, new programs and partners, there is a big need to have flexibility, speed and efficiency to keep up. With Velocity’s Loyalty’s Switch, it provides just that.
A global fuel retailer partnered with Velocity Logic who worked to create complete flexibility in loyalty in order to support multiple reward programs and partners. The solution encompasses all the company’s locations in the US and provides speed to market on new programs, cost saving on implementation, a single consumer experience, and additional future revenue opportunities.
Challenge
When working with the retailer, we found many issues that resemble many companies across all industries:
- Time to market was extremely long and costly
- Total cost to change would be significant
- The point of sale systems were a bottleneck due to the majority of the rewards occurring in real time
- Desire to innovate with multiple partners, programs, and features
- Increase security of loyalty reward processing
Goals
With Velocity, the relationship was to slowly build a new infrastructure that included more technology ownership for the retailer and the flexibility to work with partners that fit its strategy around innovation, speed, a/b testing, and cost.
What’s the Solution
- Velocity developed a cloud based software, called the “Loyalty Switch”, built using standard fuel communications, that sits above site (certified with Verifone) and is responsible for all loyalty transactions (regardless of provider).
- Transactions from the site would route to the Loyalty Switch, be interrogated, and then routed to the relevant organization for loyalty processing. This could be for any program (local, national, grocer, etc.) as long as the rules are set at the Loyalty Switch level. We think of it as a hub for all things loyalty for the retailer.
- From a customer experience standpoint, the Switch allows the retailer to remove all the prompts at site because the Switch would now make all routing decisions above site.
- The Loyalty Switch manages multiple partners and processes over 150 transactions per second, is PCI compliant, enabled with SSL, and a source of truth for the retailer.