Examining the Connection Between Blockchain and Loyalty Reward Programs
If you want to keep customers loyal, you need to reward them. That’s true in every industry, from gambling to retail.
Now blockchain tech is being brought to bear on loyalty schemes, and this has the potential to change and improve the relationship between businesses and their customers across the board.
The basics
The underpinnings of the blockchain are clearly complicated, but the overriding ideas at play are less so. It’s essentially a means of sharing and verifying data in a decentralized way, meaning no individual controls anything, and everyone’s responsible for maintaining and sustaining this ecosystem.
This can be useful in many contexts, outside of trading crypto assets. For instance, the blockchain is posited as a way to store healthcare data, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of its potential applications going forward.
The loyalty angle
For online casinos, maintaining customer loyalty has typically involved incentives like no deposit bonuses, as well as perks that are based on their wagering habits on a given site.
The problem with this is that this isn’t a particularly portable solution. Each site has loyalty reward programs that are effectively siloed, and so players can’t expect to reap the benefits elsewhere.
Even the best casinos can’t reasonably offer rewards and incentives that transfer to other contexts, without having to set up partnerships with third parties and create complex infrastructures to support this, at great cost to themselves.
The blockchain aims to overcome this by allowing loyalty initiatives to become decentralized, meaning that points can be accumulated, stored and redeemed with ease, and with significantly lower costs involved.
The added consumer control
It’s not just businesses that can benefit from blockchain-baked loyalty schemes. Customers themselves will revel in the control that this creates for them.
For instance, being able to buy cryptocurrency from SoFi and combine these tokens with points and rewards earned elsewhere on the web, all while having your assets housed indelibly and immutably on a public infrastructure, will give average users peace of mind.
No longer is it necessary to put your faith in companies to handle all of your data. With the blockchain forming the foundation of reward programs, your points are safe and your other assets can be held along with them.
The speed and efficiency
Computer systems operated by a single entity can be slow, meaning that the processing of loyalty rewards is rarely instantaneous, and could even take hours or days to complete.
The blockchain once again kicks things up a gear in this context, providing super-swift allocation of points earned, while also making them a breeze to redeem when the time is right.
The consideration of cost
There are various costs associated with operating a loyalty program. It’s not just about keeping the service up and running, but also about having to pay to detect and prevent any potential fraud being carried out by customers as well.
Transferring this over to the blockchain and leveraging the security and consistency that this provides means that businesses can minimize the expense of running such a scheme. In turn this means that more organizations will be able to justify doing so from a financial perspective, putting them on more of a level playing field when it comes to customer retention.
The bottom line
Even this brief overview of the connection between blockchain tech and loyalty reward programs is enough to reveal that there is the potential for seismic change to be brought about in this arena, with customers and companies both in a position to enjoy the advantages.