Taggo simplifies card system | Bangkok Post: tech

LOYALTY PROGRAMMES

Money-off coupons and loyalty programmes have been around forever, but despite many efforts, they have not been well integrated into the digital age with modern social media ideas clashing with antiquated back-office point of sale systems. One company believes it has found the magic ingredient that has eluded system integrators until now.

Aneace Haddad, Taggo CEO, works with SIS rather than retailers for customer loyalty programmes.

Aneace Haddad, CEO of Taggo, explained that the system works by allowing users to connect their loyalty cards, discount cards, prepaid cards or even gym membership and library cards to a single Taggo account. Then one card can be used in lieu of the others. Or the card could be virtual and the customer could even just present his phone.

Customers can go to their my Taggo account on the web to manage all their accounts from one place rather than many. The retailers benefit from the system as signing up new customers will be much quicker, without lots of forms to fill in. Customers can easily link a new loyalty programme to their existing Taggo account. Offers and discount codes can be pushed to the customer in real time over SMS.

It used to be such that a share of wallet space was the reason that loyalty cards abounded; that if someone had a card from supermarket A they would not fill it with cards from Supermarket B and C too. However, that is no longer the case and surveys now show that the problem is not that consumers are simply not bothering to sign up, but they are not bringing their cards with them and this leaves CRM (customer relationship management) programmes in disarray.

Other ways of storing customer information have their own challenges. NFC (Near Field Communications) is a way of adding smart card capabilities to a phone wirelessly. This year Taggo is launching a limited trial with a customer with 20,000 units, but at this stage it is simply done by putting an RFID sticker onto a phone or wallet.

The other trend of 2D barcodes has a temporary problem of screen quality across platforms, especially with users putting on screen protectors. Another problem is that in the field, only 20 percent of shops in the field have point of sale equipment that can scan 2D barcodes.

But it is the way the system is put together that makes Taggo unique. Rather than selling to the retailers, Taggo is talking to the system integrators and developers that do POS and CRM solutions for their customers, the retailers.

In the past, a high tech loyalty card solution provider would talk to the retailer, try and convince them, and then face an uphill, expensive struggle working with the system engineers to incorporate the technology. By working with the system integrators, the technology will be there and it will be the SI who goes to sell a much better integrated Taggo system to its customers.

"There are those companies who are dying trying to do it themselves and then there are others who are doing the whole loyalty system in-house; they are competing with other providers of loyalty systems; the companies I am working with," he said.

For the reseller, they just want the customers, the business intelligence and the programmes without having to worry about more sophisticated technology.

Haddad first came up with the idea of storing electronic coupons in smart cards 20 years ago and pioneered a real-time loyalty system that generated coupons based on the contents of a shopping basket. For example, Pepsi coupons could be automatically printed if the basket contained Coke.