The above is probably a difficult question for many brands to answer, but, no worries, help is on the way in the form of a new online guide called the Lassu Guide to Customer Loyalty Software.
Loyalty360 caught up with Jim Griffin, managing director at Lassu, to learn more about this ambitious project.
Can you give our audience a brief overview of the project?
Griffin: Years ago, when I was running loyalty for a large retailer I needed to recommend software to run the new program we were going to launch. What I quickly realized was that there was not any reference tool available that talked about this topic at a level of detail that would be actionable for me in my decision making. You could say that I wrote this guide to satisfy the needs that I myself had as a loyalty manager back then.
Can you describe the guide?
Griffin: The guide contains 191 RFP-type questions that brands should ask when evaluating a potential loyalty management system. It also contains comments and recommendations for each question, explaining why that question was included, and suggesting what to look for in the responses. The guide is organized into fifteen topic groups, plus an introductory framework discussion. There’s also a checklist for things to verify in the demo stage of the process. It’s about a hundred pages – a much bigger project than a simple white paper. In fact, the guide took more than a year to complete.
Can you give examples of some of the topics that are covered?
Griffin: Section topics include member communications, financial transaction processing, inter-system compatibility, and the bonus rules engine.
Why did you organize the guide as RFP questions?
Griffin: That’s a great question. I should start by saying that a formal RFP might not always be the best approach for every situation, especially if a brand creates an RFP document that is too onerous to complete. That’s because, in some cases, a few of the best-qualified vendors might decide not to respond at all. That said, I definitely didn’t want to write a high-level document or treat this topic in a superficial way, and writing the guide in RFP format turned out to really help me to get my head into a level of detail that I myself would have needed when I was the one making those hard decisions before, so definitely the project benefited from the discipline that was required to organize content that way.
Why is this topic so difficult?
Griffin: There are many reasons why this is a big deal for brands. First, loyalty software is at the very core of everything a company does so there’s no room for mistakes. Second, as I myself discovered when I was on the front lines, the day-to-day experience of most CMOs doesn’t really arm them with enough detailed knowledge to confidently specify all of the many business requirements for a loyalty platform. Besides that, to perform as intended, an LMS needs to integrate with many other systems. And then, to top it all off, the whole category very dynamic. New players and new systems are emerging all the time. Add it all up; it’s not easy.
Can you give an example of a detailed RFP question in the guide?
Griffin: As an example, one of the guide questions is about support for different kinds of member number formats. Seems like a simple thing. Right? But that one can bite you.
To give an example, I once worked with a retail client who had decided to adopt ORPOS (Oracle POS) prior to our engagement. It turns out that with the system they adopted only supported member numbers with a maximum of fourteen digits. On the other hand, the ISO standard for this is exactly 16 digits – no more, and no less, and this was the standard that was required by another component in the total loyalty ecosystem. The result was that ORPOS was completely unable to support member account numbers in a form that was required, due to ISO standards. This forced our client to invest time and energy in designing two parallel numbering systems, one of which was a truncated version of the other one, and this was even further complicated by the fact that both versions of the member number had check digits. You definitely would want to avoid that type of situation. That’s an example of why it’s useful to have a good checklist of almost two hundred important questions to ask.
I see your point. So where can I find the guide?
Griffin: It’s available online at lassu.net/software-guide.