Customer Loyalty in Retail: Technology Trends

Customer loyalty has now become a very hard thing to get for any retailer as customers these days have an abundance of options to choose from when shopping in the highly competitive retail market. Global Data Thematic Research highlights the key technology trends impacting the customer loyalty theme.

Customer loyalty has now become a very hard thing to get for any retailer as customers these days have an abundance of options to choose from when shopping in the highly competitive retail market. Customers will quickly move on to a competitor, if a retailer did not meet their expectations, be it in terms of price, product, or experience. To address the theever-growing challenge of customer loyalty retention, retailers are looking for new technological solutions that aid them in leveraging their most important asset, customer data.

Technology Trends

Listed below are the key technology trends impacting the customer loyalty theme, as per the report.

BLOCKCHAIN

The Blockchain technology is a method of storing transaction related information like date, time, amount, and the transacting parties, in separate blocks or digital storage units. Each of these blocks are uniquely identified with a hash code, different from other blocks and added to a public database. This is a decentralised method of storage of transactions in a P2P network, with increased anonymity and can be leveraged in devising loyalty programmes by retailers.

For example, American Express has developed a Blockchain-based loyalty programme in association with online retailer ‘Boxed’. Whenever customer purchases items from Boxed, information related to the transaction is stored in the Blockchain as a smart contract which then creates and adds the points to a loyalty system run in the backend.