Loyalty Reporting FAQs
- Transactions: [total spent on transactions] x [point accrual ratio]
- Visits: [number of visits] x [point per visit]
- Gifts / Boosts: When a customer falls into an audience or is sent a specific campaign, there are options to boost additional points to the members’ loyalty accounts.
- Points Multipliers: When a customer falls into an audience, they can receive a points multiplier on points accrued due to money spent on transactions or visits made while they are actively in the audience. Find more information Audiences.
- Manual Adjustments: When a staff member manually adds or subtracts points from an account.
- API-driven Integration Partners: Various integration partners you may have connected to your accounts.
- Block Adjustments: When a customer’s points have a negative value, AIQ deploys a ‘block adjustment’ to automatically adjust that user’s points back to 0. This is to protect you and your end consumers from a negative customer experience. You may turn off Block Adjustments by asking your account rep.
- Reasons block adjustments occur:
- Bad merges resulting in a redemption made on an account that does not have the requisite number of points after the bad merge was corrected.
- Negative points adjustment by staff member or audience multiplier.
- Changes to point accrual/point expiration settings which recalculate all historically accrued points for members. This causes some users to show that they accrued fewer points despite already having redeemed the requisite points before the point accrual logic was changed (example below).
- If you are on a supported point of sale that sends AIQ transaction ID’s, you may also access the discounts and the transactions they were applied to via API ().
- If you are on a supported point of sale that DOES NOT send AIQ transaction ID’s, or you leverage “Groupon style” redemption methodologies (i.e: Customer shows staff discount and redeems via phone and not directly on the POS from a > Tier 3 POS) then you will not be able to tie redemption’s to exact sales within AIQ.
- Rather you would need to pull discount usage from your POS reporting directly and match it to UTC timestamps from redemption’s that occurred with your AIQ ledger. This can be done by pulling redemption’s in our dashboard or via a downloadable CSV on the “Data analytics -> Member club (Tab in the report)”.
- starting_points: any event prior to the start date of the report is put here
- legacy_points: legacy point values (raw file import, pos import)
- points_earned: from sales/collectibles/visits
- points_boosted: from boosts/multipliers/referral sales
- points_adjusted: manual adjustments
- points_redeemed: redemptions
- points_expired: any points that have expired.
- points_net: legacy+accrued+boosted+adjusted-redeemed-expired
- points_start: points_net+starting_points
- starting_points: any event prior to the start date of the report is put here
- legacy_points: legacy point values (raw file import, pos import)
- points_earned: from sales/collectibles/visits
- points_boosted: from boosts/multipliers/referral sales
- points_adjusted: manual adjustments
- points_redeemed: redemptions
- points_expired: any points that have expired.
- points_net: legacy+accrued+boosted+adjusted-redeemed-expired
- points_start: points_net+starting_points
Example URL: https://lab.aiq.com/public/emailReports/1005-1005-2022-07-31-2022-08-30-rd.cs
URL meaning: https://lab.aiq.com/public/emailReports/[Account Id]-[Account ID]-[Date Range]-[Date Range]-[report type]
- How do they occur?
- The Default AIQ Merge logic merges AIQ Personas that have the same phone number OR the same email on both AIQ Personas.
- Why do they occur?
- Merges occur due to AIQ receiving multiple records of the same customer profile. Multiple AIQ Personas can result from multiple profiles being derived from various integrations (POS vs E-Comm, etc.) in addition to duplicate customer profiles being created from the same integration (multiple POS profiles, etc.)
- Why are merges important?
- AIQ's original goal was to act as the source of truth by providing you with meaningful data acquired from multiple tech platforms. In order for this data to be meaningful, it must be de-duplicated. In other words, your data must be clean and not redundant. This is accomplished via AIQ's merges. This way, you know you are looking at meaningful and valuable data.
- Merges also play an important role in loyalty programs as merges will change a Persona's loyalty status and allow that customer to become a loyalty member and accrue points. Merges also make sure every loyalty customer is receiving ALL of their points, even if some points were accrued on another POS customer profile.
- How do merges impact reporting?
- Negative point balances.
- Changes in point balances.
- Changes in data allocation (favorite store associated with points activity).
- De-duplication of contact records can cause shifts in store by store liability. If a customer's favorite store changes, the liability can be shifted to the new store.
- What are 'bad' merges?
- Bad merges are defined as 'AIQ merges that occurred for two unrelated or individual Personas'. In other words, a merge in customer profiles occurred that should not have occurred.
- How do 'bad' merges occur?
- Under AIQ default merging Logic, bad merges occur due to a phone number or email being associated with more than one individual account.
- Situations to avoid and common reasons why a phone or email would be incorrectly associated on more than one:
- Staff is entering in 'Dummy Contact Information': instead of the staff entering the correct contact info, or maybe to satisfy a customer that does not want to provide the required contact info, the staff enters in a filler 'dummy email' or 'dummy phone number' that they use across multiple customer profiles (in POS, AIQ, or otherwise). Even though these customers are unique and unrelated to each other, they will all be merged together as they share the same email or phone number.
- NOTE- this can negatively impact customer experience as well as point balances and loyalty access will change as a result of merges. Entering in 'dummy information' is STRONGLY discouraged.
- A couple uses the same contact info for individual loyalty accounts: Couples should be discouraged from using the same (home) phone number or email for their loyalty accounts unless they would like to share one account between the two of them.
- Can I change my merge logic?
- Under the Advanced section of Loyalty Settings, you can change the logic so that merges only occur if the [first + last name] match and [date of birth] match. Therefore merges are independent of phone numbers or emails collected.
- Please reach out to your CSM to discuss important edge cases in doing so:
- Promotes inaccurate data collection: With less motivation to collect accurate phone and emails, it is likely that messy / inaccurate data will be collected at a higher prevalence. This means marketing opt-ins and communications will likely be impacted if we are consistently collecting invalid phones / emails that cannot be leveraged for marketing opportunities.
- It is possible, while unlikely, for someone to have the same [first + last name] and [birthdate] as another Persona and therefore could be merged incorrectly despite following the implemented merging logic.
- Purchase protection is the act of resetting the number of days before points expire, as long as the customer remains an active by purchasing as a member during your expiration window. AIQ enforces this methodology to avoid mass support and customer backlash for all redemption types on the platform and in the future of loyalty.
- Example: Points expire 30 days after the customer’s last purchase.
- Purchase protection for non FIFO based programs should be implemented to achieve high CLTV outputs from loyalty programs.
- FIFO (First-In-First-Out) reporting can be outdated for more modern programs running than programs with points purchase protection. You should also not use FIFO when members can choose individual points to redeem from a specific order or for programs whose points expiration can vary by point (gifted, manually adjusted, multiplied points during time windows only for specific audience members, etc.
- Breakage estimates should allocate your redemptions to points earned. When customers deplete their points for redemption, costs should be allocated to specific point earnings.
- Your main concern is around breakage balancing member loyalty and growing revenue and therefore estimating the percentage of open points that will never be redeemed.
- Liability = open points x (1-% breakage) x the projected cost of each point that is redeemed. This is a constantly updating calculation in quarterly financials.
- If your breakage forecasted is high then deferred revenue will be too low, requiring a material increase in program liability while the opposite will result in trapped revenue.
- Alternatively some programs will be projected using Fair-Value-Per-Point estimates in order to discover deferred revenue. This is also a dynamic estimate that changes based on tier/ reward levels available to members at any given time, currency exchange rate, inflation.
- Points earned should be placed in deferred revenue based on the value cost of the points with breakage used to calculate it. Redeemed points should be recognized as new rev which lowers your deferred liability. Points that expired wouldn’t be adjusted unless your deferred revenue incorporates point expiration estimates.
Audience Points Reports show Personas who are currently in the audience at the time the report is run, regardless of the date range ran. This means the Audience Points Report will retroactively change as merges occur.
The logic reflected in the Audience Points Report reflects the current logic in the account and does NOT reflect the logic in the account for the time frame in question. This means if the same, historical Audience Points Report is generated multiple times, the reports will vary over time and have a variable outstanding point balances as logic in your account changes.
Because Audience Points Reports will inherently change over time, they are considered dynamic and should NOT be used to determine the financial liability from outstanding loyalty points.
Examples of Changes in Historical Audience Points Reports (and why they should NOT be utilized):
- Change in Expiration Logic
- Loyalty Program begins Jan 1, 2022
- Expiration Logic is Changed on June 1, 2022 and applied retroactively
- However, from Jan 1 2022 through May 31st, 2022, that expiration logic was not implemented. Therefore, actual financial liability of usable loyalty points during Jan 1 2022 through May 31st, 2022 should NOT incorporate expiration logic as that logic did not exist at that time.
- However, Audience Points Report WILL incorporate the expiration logic from Jan 1 2022 through May 31st, 2022 as Audience Points Reports utilize the EXISTING logic for the historical timeframe and NOT the historical logic when reporting on the historical timeframe.
- Merges
- In August 2022, I was incorrectly merged with an unrelated Persona as the staff was using Dummy Contact Information when collecting contact information at check out. This resulted in me having 300 points for August 2022.
- However, in October, it was discovered that I incorrectly was merged with another unrelated individual. So, in October 2022 I was unmerged resulting in me having a remaining point balance of 200 points (as 100 points were a result of the ‘bad merge’ and were therefore removed once the bad merge was corrected).
- If the August 2022 report is regenerated after October 2022, my outstanding point balance will reflect my ‘un merged’ account with 200 points instead of the ‘merged account’ with 300 points that was seen the first time the report was generated. This would cause variable financial liability as a result of the variable outstanding point balances seen within the same report, generated at different times (pre Aug 202 VS post Oct 2022).
Why could there have been a discrepancy between the ‘ending balance’ of one month when compared to the ‘starting balance’ of the next month?
- Prior to February 2023, ‘Audience Points Reports’ and ‘Monthly Financial Vault Reports’ used the following logic to determine the ‘starting balance’:
- With dynamic data sources, like we see in AIQ accounts, the number of loyalty customers (loyalty opt ins / opt outs) change over time, and therefore over the course of one reporting period. These changes could occur due to merges (most common), changes in CRM (file imports, new integrations), etc.
- The ‘starting balance’ was calculated by taking a snap shot at the EOM for the reporting time frame, and of the personas within the ‘loyalty customer base’ at that time. Based on the persona count at EOM, the ‘ending balance’ was determined. Then, to determine the ‘starting balance’, the expiration logic was reverse engineered to predict the ‘starting balance’ for that same audience. However, merges, changes in the CRM, etc. impacts the persona count over the course of a reporting period, and therefore the ending persona count of one month, may not provide a consistent ‘starting balance’. This is expected in a dynamic CRM like AIQ that accommodates data cleanings, merges, changes in CRM, etc.
- However, the logic has been changed on Per Store Monthly Financial Vault Reports to the following to eliminate confusion:
- The ‘starting balance’ for one month is now determined by the ‘ending balance’ of the previous month. This is because the ‘ending balance’ accounts for points at 24:00 EOM and the ‘starting balance’ accounts for points at 00:00 BOM the next month.