Competitive advantage in retail these days is closely tied to being able to deliver a superior shopping experience for customers, consistently across all channels.

One of the things that contribute to a superior shopping experience is recognizing and rewarding the customer for their patronage and loyalty.

But many retailers are still not able to do this across all channels.

While e-commerce platforms make knowing your customer and their purchase history easy because they have to log in to make a purchase, in store those same customers often purchase goods in complete anonymity.

The problem is that many legacy POS systems weren’t designed with loyalty programs in mind, so there is no way to capture their identity and purchase history at checkout.

The ideal scenario is to have a way to recognize customers at POS, as well as being able to access their purchase history and update it at POS.

You would ideally also like to be able to inform customers of any loyalty rewards they have accumulated so far from both their online and in-store purchases, and give them the option to either redeem them on the current transaction or roll them over to a future transaction.

RedIron makes it simple for any mid-size retailer to add all of this ideal functionality to their legacy POS system using our Fast Start App called 2Loyal.

Independent of the integration point, our 2Loyal App can be configured to capture whatever information you need to match the customer experience at POS with their experience online. For example:

• Customer name
• Customer email address
• Customer identification method (phone number, private label credit card account, membership number)

The 2Loyal App also permits store associates to register new users to your loyalty program during the POS checkout.

Integrating with your POS system can be done with modular plug-and-play ease using our proprietary SOA middleware layer called RI Broker.

RI Broker allows the 2Loyal App to plug into the rest of your IT architecture with minimal invasiveness as an independent module that can easily be swapped out later if needed. RI Broker handles the communication between 2Loyal and your POS and your back end so that any information collected at POS can update your customer database. RI Broker also handles queries made from the 2Loyal App to your back end to retrieve data concerning customer purchase history and rewards available for customer redemption.

If you ever need to replace your POS platform, or change your loyalty system, the modular integration approach made possible by the use of RI Broker and our 2Loyal App, make it simple to unplug from the old and plug into the new without any disruption to the rest of your system architecture.

To learn more about how RedIron’s RI Broker can simplify integrations like 2Loyal, click here to download a complimentary copy of our white paper, “Plug & play integration for the retail ecosystem”.