Crediting Loyalty Customers for Phone Purchases + How-To Video

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How do loyalty providers ensure members get credit for the purchases they make over the phone?

Over the past few months we’ve spoken with several loyalty providers about the challenges they face rewarding consumers for the purchases they make over the phone, as opposed to online.

When consumers click to buy or sign up for an offer, tracking links do all the work behind the scenes to tie member account numbers to the purchase they make. In a quick and seamless fashion, member accounts are credited with their miles, rewards points, or whatever kind of currency being offered for that particular loyalty program. When they pick up the phone, it is a different story altogether.

How a Popular Airline Reward Program Handles Phone Purchases

To get a better idea of the extent of the issue with phone purchase and loyalty programs, we looked at a popular airline loyalty program as an example.

Of the first ten merchants that appear alphabetically in the listing of online merchants participating in the airline loyalty program:

• Six out of ten had prominently displayed phone numbers, encouraging consumers to call to purchase.
• Only one of these six appeared to have a unique trackable phone number on their landing page.
• One had a less obvious phone number (but still encouraged orders by phone).
• Three had no visible phone number on their home page.

It's not clear how consumers are credited for their phone purchases in any of these cases. Member numbers were not requested through the IVR upon calling, nor did the sales agents have any indication that we were calling from a particular loyalty program.

Interestingly enough, the rewards program also featured merchants who specifically took orders by phone:

Of the five “order by phone” merchants, only two had phone numbers listed, and neither phone number appeared to be trackable. All five merchants were major national brands with online and mail-order catalog presence.

Tracking and Tools for Loyalty Providers

Call performance marketing makes crediting members for their phone purchases easy and straightforward.

1) Sign up for call performance marketing. The leading performance marketing networks have hundreds of call-based offers already available for promotion to loyalty members. Sign up, browse the offers and start promoting.

2) Invite current merchants to offer call-based campaigns. For the loyalty program mentioned in the example above, there is clearly a missed opportunity for the loyalty provider to give credit to members and earn commissions on phone calls. Using the call performance marketing platform, it is easy to send invitations to your existing merchants and retailers.  

3) Leverage loyalty-specific features in call performance marketing.  RingRevenue's call performance marketing offers loyalty specific features that capture and track the unique customer identifier on phone calls driven from online and offline promotions. Check out the latest in our How-To Video Series: Rewarding Loyalty Currency for Phone Sales for more information on finding offers and setting up loyalty features:

Does your loyalty program track and credit phone sales? 

Learn more about call performance marketing and loyalty programs. Click here.