The future of loyalty: how and why we’re bringing loyalty to the blockchain
Even though loyalty programs are largely popular, the market is not very efficient. In the US alone, every year an estimated USD 100bn worth of loyalty points go unredeemed, a Bond Brand Loyalty report finds. This just highlights how programs fail to successfully engage consumers. According to Colloquy’s Loyalty Consensus Report, 57% of consumers left because it took too long for them to collect enough points, while 53% said they left because they didn’t like the rewards offered.
Loyalty programs have been crucial in changing the way consumers interact with their favorite brands and retailers. But how did they emerge? It all began in the late 18th century, when retailers in the US started giving out copper tokens for every purchase, which then changed into stamps, which were soon replaced by box tops, coupons, that are directly printed onto product packages. Most recently, with the rise of social media, consumers are not only rewarded for purchases but different actions such as Facebook posts or Instagram shares: The options for consumer rewards have become almost endless.
The current loyalty market is ailing. We all know that painfully annoying feeling of airline miles expiring just because you couldn’t collect enough to redeem for something you actually wanted. On top of that, high customer acquisition costs, low engagement and redemption rates, the fragmentation of the loyalty market, the lock-in effect and low usability or the lack of a real value of collected points, to name a few, are making it difficult for both brands and customers to successfully navigate through the loyalty landscape.
That being said, we can all agree that loyalty programs are ripe for a revolution — and qiibee is here to help make it happen!
In essence, we are making the loyalty landscape more secure, efficient and user-friendly, by bringing loyalty programs to the blockchain and basing them on one mutual foundation (which makes it a whole lot easier to render the points collected interchangeable). By building the programs on the blockchain, there is a significantly higher level of security, both for brands and consumers, since the technology’s benefits include its tamper-proofness, immutable and not hackable.
So what exactly do we do? On the one side, brands can easily issue their own loyalty tokens via plug & play thanks to our LoyaltyToken Protocol. Simply put, brands can decide how they want to set up their loyalty programs and we do the technical groundwork for them. To make the integration experience much more convenient, we offer our software development kit, which basically supports the brands throughout the process.
On the other side, customers benefit from the conversion of points into real-value loyalty tokens. Our ecosystem offers customers the option to sell their tokens for FIAT or other crypto, or to undertake other transactions. Moreover, collecting loyalty rewards is made much more convenient, since we offer an overview of all their tokens from different brands within the qiibee ecosystem.
For this purpose, blockchain provides an ideal framework for tackling the weaknesses of today’s loyalty market: By issuing loyalty tokens you render them almost instantly and securely transferable and more importantly, the tokens have a real value, leaving users with more opportunities for usage. On top of this, our blockchain solution allows brands to circumvent the hassle of highly complex integrations.
To wrap this up, qiibee is leveraging all the potential of the blockchain technology to bring efficiency, flexibility and more value to its partners and customers.
Disclaimer: All of the information presented in this blog post is tentative and is subject to change at any time. None of the information herein should be construed as legal, accounting, or investment advice of any kind. This blog post does not represent a solicitation for investment, nor does it represent an offering or sale, public or private, of any kind of financial instrument, security or otherwise, in any jurisdiction. This blog post is provided as-is, for informational purposes only, with the intention of describing a prospective software system.
