A Scotland-based loyalty-program operator wants small businesses to collect more from loyalty programs and initiatives. As a result, the operator, Swipii, earned an award for “The Best New venture for 2014,” by the Scottish Institute for Enterprise.
Swipii is a customer loyalty company that targets local independent businesses that want to attract new customers as well as retain the ones they already have.
Swipii CEO Chitresh Sharma described in a press release the factors which led to the creation of the company.
“Small businesses need more out of loyalty schemes,” Sharma explained. “Loyalty means more than the paper punch card, which due to cost, time and technical constraints, is all small businesses have. Against multi-million pound CRM systems from brands like Tesco and Starbucks, small business loyalty needs to catch up.”
What’s more, Sharma said small businesses have focused more and more on acquiring new customers through transactional, one-off sales.
“Companies like Groupon or LivingSocial have convinced businesses that they are the answer, but this results in eye-popping discounts bringing in one time, delusional traffic,” Sharma said.
Swipii works with small- and medium-sized businesses to build custom and unique loyalty programs that offer fun rewards specific to each location. It has earned the distinction of being the U.K.’s first tablet-based customer loyalty solution.
Swipii is an innovative customer loyalty company seeking to redefine loyalty with its Swipii cards and mobile app that enable customers to collect rewards and loyalty across multiple businesses.
Swipii officials believe it’s essential for independent businesses to understand the importance of customer retention, particularly in today’s market where they are facing increased pressures from big box stores and multinational brands.
“We’re really proud to win the award, it’s further validation of our innovation in the customer loyalty market,” Swipii COO Louis Schena said. “We want to redefine customer loyalty by creating custom and unique loyalty rewards programs which are tailored to individual businesses in order to reflect their store culture, objective and personality of their owners. Our plan is to go against the existing trend of creating short-term sales by working closely with small and medium-sized businesses to help them bring their customers back more often.”
Schena said that Swipii loyalty rewards can be unique, fun, and quirky to each business.
Currently, Swipii is in the beta phase and it has signed 24 merchants in Glasgow City Centre. Swipii plans to launch at the end of April.
Swipii offers an innovative plug and play system to validate purchases and offers rewards points to the customers. It sets up a customer facing tablet (provided by Swipii) and allows customers to use a free Swipii card or mobile app that can be used as universal loyalty solution at all of Swipii’s participating locations.
Swipii comes with social media, Yelp and Trip Advisor integration and an innovative added feature called “Swipii Alliance” that helps non-competitive merchants to run cross referral deals.