The ChiDesk Loyalty system allows your customers to earn loyalty with every purchase they make. This is not a point system, in that the amount earned represents a currency value that can be redeemed on any future sales.
The aim of a loyalty program is to increase customer retention, and ensure client's have a preference for doing business with you over your competitors.
Setting up a Loyalty System
- Enable Loyalty by adjusting the Loyalty Point Calculation under your General settings. Enter the amount earned per dollar spent at your business. So to give back 1% in Loyalty on each sale, set this amount to 0,01.
- Next you can get ChiDesk to recalculate the loyalty points for all your services and products by opening up your Main Price List and doing a Bulk Update. Simply update by a 0 amount, and the new loyalty point calculation will be used to set the Loyalty earned per item.
- You can set the Loyalty to 0 on specific products or services as needed.
- Each time you save a new invoice in ChiDesk, the client's Loyalty balance will be updated, regardless of whether the sale is on account or not.
- It's important to note that even invoices that are paid for using Loyalty as the receipt method will earn the client Loyalty.
Once the above steps have been followed, clients will immediately start earning Loyalty on each sale at your business.
Redeeming Loyalty
A client who has earned loyalty can use it as a payment method to settle any invoices in their name.
- Under Settings - Payment Types, click New to create a new Loyalty payment method.
- Set the name to Loyalty, and the Type to Loyalty Points.
- Save this new Payment Type.
- When receipting a client from the Invoice or Receipt screens you'll now be able to select the Loyalty payment type.
- Selecting this option will deduct the specified amount from the clients loyalty balance.
To track how and when Loyalty is earned and spent for a client you can run the Client Statement report.
Loyalty Expiry
You can also choose to expire earned loyalty after a specified number of days. There are pro's and con's to expiring loyalty:
- If you expire loyalty, the client has no motivation to return to your business for repeat sales.
- Some clients will not be happy if their accumulated loyalty is taken away from them, regardless of your expiry policy.
- However, expiring loyalty helps motivates clients to come back to your business.
If you have set a Loyalty Expiry Period, then every night the system will check if any loyalty accumulated has expired and generated a Credit Note to deduct the balance from the Client. If a client has not been invoiced for any item for the duration of your expiry period then they lose all their existing loyalty.
The Client Statement report will include this information so you can easily track when loyalty was earned, used or expired.
- If you importing clients with loyalty balances, you must turn off loyalty expiry as they will be picked up as not having earned any loyalty and will immediately be expired. In this instance, wait for the desired expiry period before enabling this function.