Set your customers free with NiftyKey — powered by Boson Protocol
Countless businesses today use loyalty and incentives to differentiate core products, gather and mine customer data and as a promotional platform to sell specific inventory. A few even work towards building brand relationships and becoming a trusted partner of their customers.
In fact, the need for loyalty marketing has accelerated in the Covid-19 and lockdown world as offline retailers scrabble to move their customers into an online relationship and holding onto existing customers has become paramount for all businesses.
Customers also have shifted in their expectations, with Trust, Value and Experience being the key brand relationship value drivers for today’s commercially-constrained and emotionally-pressured consumers.
And yet recently the embattled Norwegian Airlines suspended its frequent flyer loyalty program, a worrying sign for all loyalty card holders not just Norwegian customers, can they really trust the brands, the programmes in which they have participated and the value they have earned? Similarly, airport lounge programmes have begun charging fees to ‘guarantee entry’, even for customers already holding the entitlement to use the lounge, completely destroying the ‘promise’ of an enhanced experience which many brands have used to build customer relationships.
This expectation of a trusted relationship with a brand has brought NiftyKey to life — as a way of ensuring Trust, between consumers in programmes, brands that reward them with value and the merchants and experience operators that will fulfil those rewards and benefits promises.
NiftyKey uses the unique capabilities of Boson Protocol for tokenising real world assets and customer experiences for use across a compatible network, with in-built guarantees of performance across a broad ecosystem of compliant partners and merchants. NiftyKey is a new solution to a very current customer need. one that will engender trust, provide value and guarantee experiences for customers, brands and merchants alike.
We are therefore delighted to introduce you to NiftyKey, built on top of the emergent Boson Protocol as a tool for delighting customers, differentiating brand experiences and future proofing loyalty against the rapidly changing consumer needs.
Why does marketing need rethinking?
Marketing is an old fashioned misnomer, a throwback concept when having a logo and a nice message meant that you sold more products.
- Customer Relationship Management is inherently assumptive; it assumes that we know what customers want and that we can manage their expectations.
- Loyalty is a fallacy; today’s consumers are just smarter than that.
- Customer Experience is the new King, but customer audiences are changing fast.
- Digital natives have a new set of values, expecting freedom, varieties of choice and instant results.
- Crypto-natives have wrestled back control from ‘the system’ and expect to own, control, aggregate, disseminate and use, when needed, the value they can extract from the brands they frequent.
- But this is not how ‘marketing’ is designed to work; marketeers want to be in charge, to make the rules and change them to suit the business, to limit costs and increase margins.
Marketing today, its clinical design principles, regimented mechanics and automated technology, is totally at odds with the unconstrained, open and customisable member experience ‘sandbox’ in which customers want to create and play.
How is NiftyKey transforming Marketing?
A marketing revolution is needed — not just better pictures, smarter words or surgical extraction of machine mined data, but a recognition that customers are actually in control. Our job in ‘customering’ is to encourage these journeys, listen hard, follow fast and add value in the next step to help consumers to enjoy their experience with our brands.
Firstly, we need a change in lexicon. Let’s stop using the Boomer-esque terms like ‘Millennials’, ‘GenX, Y, or Z’, because today’s customers want to be creators; players; commentators; amplifiers or even traders, and they want to have that type of customer experience with their favourite brands.
Relationship programmes need to be designed to serve the customer first in the way that allows them to derive maximum value, while helping the customer to own and use that value to their maximum benefit, in a way that enhances and differentiates their brand preferences.
New technology is needed to support this new thinking, putting the customer in charge and opening the gates to ecosystems of partners, facilitating co-opetition and enabling marketplace models for the free trading of customer experiences and benefits, all operating on common capabilities and standards.
As with its use for cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology offers a few unique capabilities when it comes to creating market places with fast, frictionless transaction processing and with automated dispute resolution including;
- Identity management or Digital ID (DID) — allowing transactions to occur with pseudo -anonymity of a trusted agent, with some elements of ID data only permissioned to certain intermediaries for specific reasons
- Data sharing — across an ecosystem and the management of Access Control Lists (ACL) and private key encryption to ensure certain data is protected in the network and only available for the intended recipient
- Value storage and transfer — with trustless transactions processed by a network of peers in a way that removes friction and creates certainty for immediate automated reconciliation and settlement
NiftyKey will enhance and differentiate your crypto brand
Boson Protocol is a next generation technical capability which specifically addresses the transfer of value of tokenised real-world assets like art, consumer products, customer experiences and benefits. It is this underlying capability on which NiftyKey is being built to offer unique advantages to program operators and their partners.
Participants can use NiftyKey and the Boson Protocol to create digital Non Fungible Tokens i.e.; NFT’s, representing specific physical world items and consumer experience entitlements, effectively as digital vouchers, called Commitment Tokens. Using Commitment Tokens for the facilitation of rewards and benefits usage and exchange across a network and linked to standard ERC20-based ThingTokens allows for the trading of items and interoperability with a wider ecosystem using the Ethereum blockchain based standards as supported by most digital wallets.
Effectively, real world assets, experiences and benefits can now be represented, stored and transferred on a blockchain just as easily as cryptocurrency, with the speed and cost advantages of trustees transactions without the need for separating reconciliation and settlement accounting. The tokenised assets are effectively now a liquid asset for holders to use as they want, storing trading, playing, risking, lending or sharing in all types of customer value propositions.
Companies using NiftyKey can ensure customer satisfaction with their services and allow ownership of the relationship assets independent of control from the brand that issued them in the first place.
Providing truly immutable ‘ownership’ of loyalty value and benefits awarded to programme members must be an appealing concept to crypto-native customers and their favourite brands in such a scenario.
The biggest advantage of ‘decentralisation’ for loyalty programme members is to be able to remove a single point of failure risk from a value ecosystem and giving members the ability to control, to own, use and manage their program benefits in the form of miles, points, tier benefits and experiences, in the way they in which they choose.
Furthermore when members use their benefit entitlements, they expect them to be available, but sadly this is sometimes not the case as indicated by certain airport lounge operators now charging an additional £5 to members to ‘guarantee access’ to members who are already holding the entitlement to use the lounge.
As an additional transactional benefit of NiftyKey it uses the underlying capabilities of Boson Protocol for automated dispute arbitration and solution, a game theory mechanic based on staking which will penalise bad network participants commercially and reputationally, ensuring that both sides of the bargain are upheld.
NiftyKey is a new, innovative tool for decentralised loyalty programmes across networks of partners that to some extent enables a ‘self governing’ transaction flow between brands issuing loyalty value to consumers, members holding and using that value at merchants which will offer the benefit in return for a trusted and near instant payment.
If there is dissatisfaction on behalf of the member or dispute raised on either side, the staking mechanic course corrects the network without further interventions.
Why is this so important?
Differentiating a brand through loyalty is difficult in the currently saturated loyalty market place, however building a different type of loyalty programme with NiftyKey creates completely unique customer benefits including;
- Choice — is increased for consumers as they can take the value they have earned and use it across a broad network of ecosystem partners
- Instant — rewards are available to members as soon as they are earned, given the participating brands also have guaranteed transactions with near instant reconciliation and settlement
- Open — networks of participants in the partnering ecosystem means greater opportunities for turning commercial situations like distressed inventories into increased value rewards and experiences for members
- Customisation — of the member experience is available as they can hold, use, trade swap or otherwise manage their tokenised assets as suits their needs, just like they can the cryptocurrencies in their wallets
- Ownership — is the expectation of digital and crypto-natives; a benefit or a reward once earned and sitting in the members account isn’t removable nor does it rely on the survival of a single brand to retain its value
- Trust — in the benefit provenance, its availability and the network to self-govern and remove bad actors
Moving towards dCommerce models and new customer propositions means changing the capability of a brand to engage and reward its customers, for which new technology is needed to enable these new ideas. Credited to Albert Einstein is the quote ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different outcomes’.
About NiftyKey
Niftykey is a crypto-native rewards platform, powered by Boson protocol. It makes it easier to cut through the noise and improve lifetime value in order to enhance and differentiate your business by rewarding customers with real-world products and services.
Visit www.NiftyKey.com for more information.
To contact NiftyKey, click here.
About Boson Protocol
Boson Protocol’s vision is to enable a decentralised commerce ecosystem by funding and enabling the development of a stack of specialist applications to disrupt, demonopolise and democratise commerce.
Boson Protocol achieves this via an open tokenised economy of things which:
- automates the redemption of digital rights for physical assets using NFTs encoded with game theory.
- disrupts e-commerce platforms by tokenising things and their data within a liquid digital market, built on DeFi.
Keen to learn more about Boson Protocol? Read our Lightpaper:
Let’s build an Open tokenised economy together.
- Find out more about us at www.BosonProtocol.io
- Check us out on Twitter.
- Join our Telegram discussions here.
- Want to dive deeper? Read our whitepaper.
Lastly, if you’re a decentralisation enthusiast, please follow us here, on Medium. We will post frequently about our dCommerce journey and would love to hear your comments!
