Steve Taylor's Blog

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work in the loyalty area especially dealer customer loyalty and manufacturer brand loyalty and thought I would share some of the technology surrounding loyalty schemes/programmes.

Consumers are more inclined to participate in a loyalty programme during a recession and that loyalty rewards hold increasing value in the current economic downturn.

A lot of loyalty programmes in use today are accompanied by a loyalty card (aka reward card, club card, points card, advantage card) which facilitates the tracking of the customer.  Even though the card has some psychological benefits it essentially acts a an identifier.

Cards and Other Forms of ID

Plastic “credit card” style cards are normally used as they fit nicely in most peoples wallets and purses but variations do exist:

• Paper cards
• Plastic cards
• Key fobs
• Nothing (just ask the customer for ID)

Rather than just have the customers name on the front of the card normally for convenience and security reasons the card will hold a unique identification number.  This number usually appears on the front of the card just in case the reader or card becomes faulty – this allows manual entry of the number.  The number can be read in a number of ways to make it quicker and easier for the operator at POS.  The main ways to read the card are as follows:

• Magnetic Stripe
• Barcode
• Smart Chip
• RFID (Radio-frequency identification)

Future of Loyalty Cards

There are some downsides to having cards:

• According to recent research a third of customers forget or don’t carry their loyalty card. 
• There are so many loyalty cards out there it’s quite common to have too many cards to carry.
• With all of these cards being produced, there is a recycling and green element to consider.
• The cost of readers at the dealership can be seen as cost prohibitive.

One way to combat these issues is to use the customers mobile phone.  More and more phones now have NFC (Near Field Communication) capability.  NFC is an emerging technology that allows wireless communication between devices from about 4 inches in distance.  Most people have a mobile phone and this can be used more and more as a loyalty tool.  SMS, MMS etc. are currently used heavily in loyalty to send vouchers and codes to customers.

Barcodes have also evolved and moved to the mobile phone. Pepsi use a 2D barcode that customers can photograph with their phone to show messages or download ringtones and wallpapers.

Microsoft Tag

At this years CES 2009, Microsoft announced their own 2D barcode, called Microsoft Tag.  This barcode is based on the High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB)but has an interesting twist.  The tag doesn’t really carry any information but a unique code that gets looked up on the internet.  This way you can store more information but more interestingly, you can log how many times the tag has been scanned.

You’ll need an application on your smart phone (or iPhone).  To get the application, point your phone’s browser to http://gettag.mobi.   Here are a couple of tags that I’ve just created to test it out.

Conclusion

Treating the customer well, making them feel special and personalising communication is the basis for customer loyalty.  All dealers should be doing these things from day to day, but combined with a loyalty programme and loyalty card the dealer can gain an insight into customers buying behaviour.  Identifying who your best and worst customers are, along with gaining feedback from them will help position your business above your competitors.

This book has quality in every direction, from the physical finish and type of paper used to the great authoring style.  The book is very well presented with great illustrations and examples.

It starts off by demystifying the true meaning of what an Information Dashboard is and then goes into what I thought was the best chapter of the book – Tapping into the power of visual perception.  This chapter was really interesting especially for me coming from a design background.  It goes into the science of visual perception, the pre-attentive mind and short term memory.

When you read this book you need to bear in mind the context in which you operate.  This book pushes home the communication factor of dashboards which may not be as important in your situation.

All in all this is a “must read” book for anyone who creates and designs information dashboards.

Overview

Pros: Simple, effective and to the point with great supporting material
Cons: None
Rating:  5/5
Verdict: Highly recommended. I’ve even purchased his other major title: Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

This book covers all aspects of data warehousing and gives examples along with downloadable source code for Microsoft SQL Server 2005/08.  The book goes into quite a bit of detail in certain areas but in others it just skims the surface.  It’s a great book to get someone started off in data warehousing as it covers the main aspects well.

That said, once you’ve read this book you may also want to go on and look at specific areas in more detail, such as Reporting Services (SSRS), Integration Services (SSIS), Business Intelligence (BI) and Analysis Services (SSAS).

My only complaint with is book (if you can call it that), is that the author tends to repeat himself and state the obvious quite a lot.  This is probably to help the information sink in and probably aimed more towards the novice.

Overview
 
Pros: Covers all aspects well, scenario based theme with examples
Cons: Too many words to describe the facts, enterprise view only, no smaller project examples
Rating:  4/5
Verdict: Recommended for anyone looking to build a DW and haven’t done so before.

Automotive Analytics

There are a number of analytical software packages on there on the market and most of them offer an on-demand, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version.

For those who don't know, Google offer a free way of measuring activity on your website, called Google Analytics.  They offer this service for free to encourage you to advertise with them via there Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising.

The one major downside (if you see it as one), is that Google can use the data you gather to help them evolve there products and services in the future.  If this doesn't bother you then I would suggest you get yourself set up.

Event Tracking

By default, Google Analytics mainly tracks page views and visitor information but sometimes you need more information about what’s happening on your website.  Currently in beta and therefore not fully available, Google have a new event tracking API (Application Programming Interface) that allows you to track custom events on your website.  For example, you may want to know how many users have watched all of video or how many have bombed out after just a few seconds, or how many users have searched for a certain make or model from your used car search.

Even though it’s in beta and the information isn’t available in the analytics I believe that Google are still recording the data you capture if you start using the API now.  This is how to implement it to track how many people are searching for each make and model.

First of all you need to make sure that you are using the latest analytics API, the JavaScript include is called ga.js not the urchin.js which is the older one.

Now lets assume you have something like this simple search:

On the “Search Button” we need to add a little JavaScript to the onclick event:

   1: onclick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Search', 'Quick Search', Make.value + '|' + Model.value);"

A better way of attaching this code is unobtrusively via an attachevent.  Here is an example using JQuery:

   1: $("#SearchButton").click(function()

   2: {

   3:     pageTracker._trackEvent('Search', 'Quick Search', $('#Makes').val() + '|' + $('#Models').val());

   4: });

The above code simply call the _trackEvent function of the pageTraker object and passes in a few parameters:

• category (required)  - The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track
• action (required) - A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• label (optional)  - An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
• value (optional) - An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.

I’ve assigned a category of “Search” and the action of “Quick Search”; this allows us to categorise for advanced searches, new vehicle searches etc. I then specify the label that is the Make and Model values concatetated by a | character. e.g. Volkswagen|Golf.  I have omitted a value for this type of tracking.

I must note that this type of tracking isn’t new and is included in the more advanced enterprise analytics packages all of which come with hefty price tags compared to the freeness of Google.  In addition, this type of tracking would be easy to implement if you were to do your own custom bespoke solution.

Here is the link to the full Google documentation.