USER EXPERIENCE

The UX of stamping loyalty cards

Published in

Swipii

6 min readApr 4, 2019

I’ve recently been working with Swipii, helping them to design a smooth on-boarding for businesses who sign up for their service. As a result, I found myself thinking more generally about the user experience of loyalty cards and loyalty stamps for businesses.

This article is my attempt to offload these ponderings from my head and clear some room in there for something else. I hope you find it useful.

What’s Swipii?

Unless you live in Glasgow or work in the UK tech scene you might not have heard of Swipii yet. But you will do soon enough I hope. Swipii is an app for your phone. You automatically earn loyalty points with the businesses signed up on the service whenever you spend money with them.

You link the app to your payment card and it detects when you’re due some loyalty points from the businesses you give custom to. You then get free stuff from the businesses when you spend enough with them.

The stamp card standoff

When we first use a business, it’s rare (for me anyway) to swoop up the stamp card straight away. We usually need to spot the fact that we’ve been going to that place repeatedly.

To explain why this is, I’m going to reach for one of my favourite experience models, the Fogg Behaviour Model.

Behaviour = Motivation x Ability x Prompt
(at the same moment)

It’s a very simple model which helps us to understand the likelihood of a behaviour taking place. When I first use the coffee shop, I see the sign about getting your tenth coffee free. This is my prompt. My ability to grab a card is pretty high, they are sitting right in front of me. My motivation however is very low and so I don’t take the card.

The idea of having yet another card in my wallet is competing with my perception of the likelihood of me actually claiming a free coffee. I go back a few times and the same prompt greets me each time. But still, the motivation isn’t high enough to trigger the behaviour.

I go back some more and feel I’m definitely going to miss out on some free coffees here unless I grab one. The prompt and the ability have remained constant each time, but now my motivation has grown and after repeated prompts I’m grabbing one.

I’m on board and have missed out on a number of stamps already (we’ll come back to that).

Initial adoption of Swipii

Being honest, this initial stand-off is likely to take more motivation to get beyond if we replace the stamp card with Swipii app. The prompt is roughly the same and repeats each time I visit. But initially, ability and motivation might not be as high. It’s more involved than sticking a card in my pocket and, unless I get it set up while I’m in the queue, I won’t get points for this upcoming purchase.

But after this initial hurdle, everything about the Swipii experience is better and the growth of Swipii should mean it can build greater levels of motivation than a standard stamp card can.

Relying on further prompts

I’ve been working a few days each week in the offices of a financial services company in Edinburgh. After my initial stand-off with the loyalty card, I realised I was buying an americano every morning from the coffee shop there. So I eventually grabbed a card.

After 7 further coffees here is a picture of it…

As you’ll hopefully have noticed there aren’t 7 stamps on this card. These stamps came from the two times I was asked if I had a card to stamp. This was a prompt for the behaviour of getting my card out to be stamped, the other 5 times I wasn’t asked and I forgot.

In order for me to build up to my free coffee, an additional behaviour is required of me at every purchase. That behaviour is to pull this card out of my wallet and hand ask for it to be stamped.

The motivation and ability to do so are usually moderate, but the prompt is often non-existent. I need to remember or be asked in order to get a stamp.

Let’s compare that to Swipii

If, instead of a stamp card, this business had offered loyalty points through Swipii then I would have had the equivalent of 7 stamps in loyalty points with the business by now. This is because once adopted, no further behaviours are required. No need for prompts, motivation or ability. The ‘stamp’ happens automatically when I pay.

Reclaiming my coffee

Yesterday, I claimed my free americano and it tasted even better than normal (the coffee is very good there). But guess what I forgot to do. Yup, I forgot to grab another card. There’s another behaviour that may or may not happen the next time I’m there (update, I forgot to ask the next day).

I already have Swipii app

Until now I’ve been comparing the experience of grabbing a stamp card to setting up with Swipii. This shows that the initial setup of Swipii will require more motivation than my putting a bit of card in my pocket. After that the Swipii experience is the smoothest of the two by a long way.

In reality however, I already have Swipii on my phone. Had this company been rewarding loyalty through Swipii, there wouldn’t have been a single behaviour required of me. I would have found out I’d been rewarded through the Swipii app, simply for paying with my card.

Not only would I have all the ‘stamps’ I forgot. But I’d also have all the ‘stamps’ from the coffees I’d bought before I got the stamp card.

Asking for a stamp isn’t a great customer interaction

Like me, you might have sometimes not bothered asking for your card to be stamped at a coffee shop you use frequently. There’s a bit of a queue, the barista is looking super busy and you forgot to have it ready for them at the time you were paying. You had stuff in your hands and you’d already stuffed your wallet or purse away.

There is something a little desperate about asking the barista to stamp your card at this point.

In fact, the act of asking to collect your reward is simply the wrong way round in terms of customer experience. I shouldn’t be asking to be recognised for my loyalty, instead I want the business to do that without me begging for it.

It feels a bit grubby asking a business to thank you each time for coming back.

Read some other stuff I wrote

I hope this brain dump was interesting. I have dumped my brain into Medium on previous occasions in the following ways.