Integrating with Azpirals Loyalty Platform

We currently have an integration with Azpiral so that your website can integrate with their loyalty platform.  The following are how the integration works:

What additional features does the Loyalty Platform bring?

The following are the additional features:

• All customers will join your loyalty platform through your website going forward.  So you should get a lot more customers on to your loyalty platform.
  • When a customer joins the website, they automatically get a Loyalty account set up in the background - you can turn this feature off so that they don't join automatically but have the option to join the Loyalty platform at any time from their own account.
• All customers will get a virtual loyalty card. You will only need to give a physical loyalty card to those who request one.
• You can use the extensive loyalty platform marketing features to market to all your loyal customers, both online and offline.
  • There will be a field in Mail Chimp which is checked for Loyalty customers to allow you filter them out for certain emails - so that you don't send the same email to the same customer from Azpiral and Mail Chimp..
• The web account and loyalty account will be merged into one account so your customers wont get confused as they will only have one account with you.
• When a customer logs in, they will see their current points and their loyalty card number.
• When they update their web account details (e.g. change their last name or mobile number), a background request will be sent to the loyalty platform to update their details.
  • If the Loyalty Platform can not make the change at that point in time, you can have the details of the change request sent to an email account so that you can rectify these changes manually.
• When they are making an order online and are going through checkout, they will be:
  • Told how many additional points they will get if they instead complete their order as-is
  • Prompted if they want to cash in some or all of their points for a discount which will then be applied automatically to their order if they choose YES.
    • NOTE that if they decide to use a promo code, they will not be given any loyalty points so that we avoid double-discounting
• When a web order is make, their points will update immediately.

What happens when a customer creates an online account?

When your customers create an online account, it will automatically create their account on the loyalty platform as well so that your customers only ever have 1 account that they set up with you and not multiple accounts.

If for some reason, the loyalty platform won't create the account (e.g. the customer's email address or mobile number is already registered with another account on the Loyalty platform), the web account is created anyway and no error message is shown to the customer so the customer does not know this happened.  And then each time the user logs in, they will be shown a message on their home page suggesting they join the loyalty platform which allows them connect to the loyalty platform.

If you want this feature to be turned off so that an account is not automatically set up when they join the website, just contact the Help Desk to turn this off.  Note that they will still be allowed to join the loyalty platform from their account each time they log in.

What about customers who have a web account but are not connected to the Loyalty platform?

When a customer logs in, if they are not already registered with the loyalty platform (e.g. they set up their account before the loyalty platform was turned on), they will be prompted to join.  They just need to click JOIN and they will be able to join the Loyalty platform.

What about customers who already have a Loyalty card/account?

When a customer creates a web account, or already have a web account and decide to join the Loyalty platform, they will have the option to enter their existing loyalty card number.  If they do, instead of creating a new account for them on the Loyalty platform, the existing account will be attached to the web account.

This includes customers who pick up a physical card in store that is not yet registered for loyalty instore.

If the existing account on the Loyalty platform has a different email address, it will not let the customer attach to the account.  So for security purposes, the customer needs to have the correct email address and correct loyalty account card number to be able to attach to their account.

NOTE that the website does not allow more than 1 web account for the same email address which should help minimise duplicate account issues.

What happens if the Loyalty Platform returns a validation error?

The loyalty platform can return an error if "email account already exists for another account" or "mobile phone number already being used for another account", or possible other technical errors.  In these cases, if the customer is creating a web account, or is making changes to their online details like first name and last name, we will try and update the Loyalty platform but if it comes back with an error, we will ignore it and allow the changes to go through.  This is because it would require manual intervention by the retailer which will take a few days and the customer will get very frustrated trying to make a change, say, in the evening, and getting a technical error back each time that they cant resolve.

So for some accounts, their web details may not be the same as the details on their loyalty platform, especially for older loyalty accounts.  You can decide to be notified of all validation errors returned by email and then rectify these issues manually as described in the following section.

IMPORTANT information regarding OPTING OUT

When a user opts out of MAIL CHIMP (email) or PHONOVATION (SMS), their opt out is not sent to the Loyalty Platform.  The website only communicates OPT-INS and OPT-OUTS to AZPIRAL when the user goes through the UPDATE YOUR DETAILS page.

When a user clicks SAVE on their UPDATE YOUR DETAILS page in their website, it communicates the opt-out to the loyalty platform and to MAIL CHIMP too.

So you need to manage the OPT-OUTS separately for any communications that go directly from Azprial or point the user to opt out through their UPDATE YOUR DETAILS page

Getting notified of all Loyalty Platform errors

If there is a validation error on the Loyalty Platform, if you supply an email address to the Help Desk, you will then get notified of all validation errors covering the following:

• New Account Registration Errors - this is when the customer tries to register a new account but is prevented by the loyalty platform - the customer will not receive an error and you won't need to do anything as they can try again the next time they log in.
• Attach Existing Account Registration Errors - this is when the customer tried to attach an existing loyalty account with their web account - the customer will be shown an error and will not be allowed to proceed so will likely contact you about the error - it is up to you whether you want to ignore these errors.
• Account Update Errors - these are errors when the user makes a change to their account.  You need to manually fix these changes on the Loyalty platform if you want both accounts to be kept in sync.
• New Order Errors - these are errors when the customer creates an order and is when their points can not be applied to their account

What gets sent to Azpiral for each order

When a customer makes a purchase, we send the following information over to Azpiral immediately after they complete their order:

• Product Code - the first 20 characters as Azpiral only allow a max of 20 characters
• Product Title - (the first 50 characters)
• Department - (the first 10 characters) - this is the top level website category
• Category - (the first 10 characters) - this is the 2nd level website category (if there is one)
• SubCategory - (the first 10 characters) - this is the 3rd level website category (if there is one)