Founded in 2009, vLoyalty is a privately held company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The company combines the power of payments, card-linking loyalty and promotions, and text messaging to help companies easily enroll, engage, understand, and reward customers to drive repeat visits and sales.
vLoyalty offers clients a patented cloud-based suite of solutions that meets the needs of small businesses as well as large franchise enterprises. These solutions enable efficient and convenient loyalty program enrollment at the point of purchase. Clients can also take advantage of real-time access to historical purchasing data to optimize point-of-sale (POS) targeted offers and leverage compliant SMS text messaging to engage customers—all with seamless payment integration.
Loyalty360 spoke with Peter Vogel, Chief Revenue Officer at vLoyalty, about loyalty program automation at the checkout, vLoyalty’s recent quick-service restaurant study, and what’s coming next for the company in 2024.
Founded in 2009, vLoyalty is a privately held company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The company combines the power of payments, card-linking loyalty and promotions, and text messaging to help companies easily enroll, engage, understand, and reward customers to drive repeat visits and sales.
vLoyalty offers clients a patented cloud-based suite of solutions that meets the needs of small businesses as well as large franchise enterprises. These solutions enable efficient and convenient loyalty program enrollment at the point of purchase. Clients can also take advantage of real-time access to historical purchasing data to optimize point-of-sale (POS) targeted offers and leverage compliant SMS text messaging to engage customers—all with seamless payment integration.
Loyalty360 spoke with Peter Vogel, Chief Revenue Officer at vLoyalty, about loyalty program automation at the checkout, vLoyalty’s recent quick-service restaurant study, and what’s coming next for the company in 2024.
Speaker 1:
Good afternoon, good morning. It's Mark Johnson from Loyalty360. I hope everyone's happy, safe and well. I want to welcome you back to another edition of Loyalty Live. In this series we speak to leading agencies, technology partners and consultants in customer channel and brand loyalty about the technology trends and best practices that impact a brand's ability to drive unique experiences, enhance engagement but, most importantly, impact customer loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Peter Vogel. He's the Chief Revenue Officer for vPromos. Welcome, peter, how are you today? Thank you, Happy to be on. First off, can you tell us a little bit more about your current role with vPromos and provide an overview of how your company works with brands to enhance their customer experience and customer loyalty efforts?
Speaker 2:
Sure happy to so. Vloyalty is a company that powers loyalty programs and that can be from soup to nuts, where we run the entire program, or we can simply enhance and help, improve and fix someone's loyalty program, and I'll explain what that means in a second. What's unique about VLoyalty, and what our key differentiator really is, is that we have a patent around the process of remembering a member's credit card. So, for example, you know it's a very common, you know process. When you're running a loyalty program, you walk into a store. Someone has to say, hey, are you in the loyalty program? And if you are, they say okay, what's your phone number? They type in your phone number. Or you type in your phone number, or you show a mobile app, you scan a QR code.
Speaker 2:
There's always an extra step involved and a lot of that relies on people remembering to ask every single time, and I'll tell you some of the studies we've done. That kind of show that that just doesn't happen in a second. But so the way our system works is if you enter, you make a purchase, put your card in, if the system doesn't recognize your credit card, it's going to say, hey, would you like to start earning rewards today for this purchase. You say yes, you add your phone number one time, so the system remembers the phone number and that's the unique identifier from that point on for your loyalty program account. But at the same time it's actually created a token for your credit card and it remembers that token in the cloud. So this can operate across a chain. So say, a restaurant that has 200 locations. You join at one location, we remember your credit card in the cloud as a token and anytime you go to any of those locations you're automatically tracked. So you walk in the store, put your card in, make a purchase and it just says congrats, you just earned 50 points, so you just earned X amount back and you get a text message immediately.
Speaker 2:
So the power of the program is really the automation. It's automating the process of someone signing up because they sign up right on the terminal You're not dependent on. Even if a cashier never says a word, it's going to pop up on the terminal and say, hey, would you like to join the loyalty program? 100% of the time, or it recognizes you 100% of the time. So you eliminate the need for humans to constantly remember to ask, which is especially tough in the QSR world, with fast food, with people, the turnover, a younger staff, there's a lot of people, lines are long, everyone wants to move fast. So oftentimes people just don't ask.
Speaker 2:
So a lot of times we go to a program who is having trouble getting more people sign up or they're missing lots of transactions, and those are signs that they need a technology like ours. So we have a patent on that process and one of the largest brand that would be known kind of to to all the listeners out there is and napa auto parts. So in the us we operate their, their program. We've actually operated their program for, I think, 11 years right now and that's across almost 5 000 locations in the US. Believe it or not, napa has 5,000 auto parts stores across the US and it's about 15 million people. And we also just started operating, about two and a half years ago, napa Auto Parts in Canada obviously significantly smaller it's about 10% the size, just because Canada's population is much smaller. But that's another major program that we run and is a brand that your listeners would be familiar with.
Speaker 1:
B-Promo has recently conducted a study that looked at quick service restaurants, qsrs and secret shoppers. Can you tell us a little bit more about the study, your findings and what brands should take away from the results?
Speaker 2:
Yes. So we will have the final study I think the results out in probably about two weeks. I think we're finishing up some of the last kind of analysis call it two to three weeks and what we were really looking at is we looked at the top 15 QSRs. We looked at one if they had loyalty programs, and then what we were really looking at was like how automated are the programs? Like, how easy are they to join, how easy is it to be tracked? How easy is it to get a reward? Are there a lot of hurdles for members to have to go through? Just, is it hard to join? Can you join at the point of sale? Like, is it requiring the counter person to take multiple steps just to enroll you? So that's really what we were looking at.
Speaker 2:
We weren't looking at in general is the loyalty program good or bad, or just rating the whole program. We were really focused on the automation, like what QSRs really have automated. You know, automated loyalty programs that are easy for people in all steps, from the joining to the tracking, to the getting rewards. Like, do you and this sounds like a little thing but do you get a reward automatically or do you actually have to go into an app or somewhere and check a box and then ask to get the reward, because we find that's a big hurdle, even when people get rewards. I'll look, I have the Chipotle app and I'll have a thing for a free guac or a free soft tacos, but I don't see it. It sits there for three months and I didn't even use it. So there was an opportunity for me to have a very positive experience and be thankful and happy and excited about going to Chipotle because I got free stuff, but I didn't even see it and there's no way I'm finding out unless I actually go kind of open the app, look into it, et cetera. So we don't have all the analysis done yet, but I will say just some of the interesting things in general and these numbers are not exact because we're not 100% done, but some of the things we found that were very interesting is more than 90% of the time it might even be closer, like 95% of the time the counterperson did not ask if we were a member of the loyalty program during the purchase, and this is in five different cities. We had people in five cities going to each of these QSRs multiple times, different locations. We did a total of about 150 restaurant purchases to see what happened. And somewhere I think it's going to come down to somewhere. Between 90 to 95% of the time nobody asks if you're in the program. So that's I. I mean, it's literally almost never.
Speaker 2:
Um, another thing we found out. That was we thought, was, I mean, I guess, not unexpected, but I didn't realize to the extent that it was true. Is, I think, also in this same range, 90 to 95 percent of the uh, the loyalty programs required you to have a mobile app. You couldn't just join with a phone number, you couldn't just even join online. A lot of times you had to actually download an app and then use that app when you make the purchase, or after you make the purchase at the point of sale. You have to, like, scan something in order to get your points. So you have to constantly open the app, find it on your phone. Which is the annoying part about that is oftentimes, if you don't go to a restaurant a lot, it's going to ask you to refresh the app because it hasn't been used in three months. So you're in line trying to get the app and now you got to download a whole new version of it, so one, we were kind of surprised by that and I think in the neighborhood and and again we're still finalizing them there's these numbers.
Speaker 2:
But another kind of thing we were surprised by so all of these places we went to had loyalty programs. It's somewhere between about 20% of the time. So the way we did it is we went in, made a purchase and if no one asks us if we're in the loyalty program after the purchase, we asked oh hey, by the way, do you guys have a rewards program? To About 20% of the time people actually said no, we don't have them. When they actually did so, not only were they not asking us, when we inquired and tried to kind of learn about the program, we were actually told by people that and it's funny too some of these places had amazing signage, like all over the restaurant, like by the cash register on the door, like like six foot tall standalone things that are talking about the loyalty program, and the counterperson literally could be standing right next to one of those things just telling us that no, we don't have a program. So we thought that was odd. So a lot of all those things to me are highlight why we need something like what VLoyalty does is people are not getting asked to join and if you don't ask them if they're in the rewards program, even if people did join, you're going to miss tracking their transaction Because if you think about it, I'm sure you're probably a member of 20 programs more and you probably forget half the ones you joined.
Speaker 2:
If you walk in the store, you don't remember am I in this program or not? Or do you care? If they don't ask you for your phone number, you're probably not going to say a word, you're just going to make the purchase and leave right. So you've missed an opportunity. That brand has missed the opportunity to interact with you and positively tell you hey, congrats, you just got 50 points. Or hey, you just earned five bucks off your next purchase. You know brands are missing out on these opportunities for all these interactions because they're not tracking, they're not asking and they're just not recognizing who their members are. So that's really the value of what we're doing and what we were really trying to dig into with this QSR study.
Speaker 1:
Employee engagement and building emotional loyalty with team members are priorities for many brands today, especially with QSRs, where you can often have high turnover. How are your clients engaging employees and what was revealed by your study?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so that's a whole I would call that a whole nother business of employee training, which and I'm not sure that's not something we really specialize in, but I would say it's a huge gap, like just us finding that 90% plus of the time nobody is asking about the low-wage program and then people are telling us they don't even have one. So it's very clear that they're not being trained to ask regularly. Only one there was one fast food place, panera Bread. They asked almost every single time are you part of the program? They were one of the only ones that was consistent and we also had a really interesting and I'm not sure yet if this is consistent across the country, but Subway had a really interesting model where actually on the screen it asks you to join and you can put your phone number in. It doesn't take it to the next step and send you a text and you know, ask you to opt in, but they do let you join on the terminal, but they don't track your card from that point on. So Subway kind of does half of what we recommend that people do, and Subway was the only one that actually let people to join right there. So it didn't require a counter person, and so we're kind of the opposite to that question. I mean, we're trying to eliminate that question by not having to train the salespeople, by having the smart terminal that you're paying with be the device that actually gets you to join the tracks and actually tells you that you got rewards, so that we don't need people to do it.
Speaker 2:
I don't know who out there has come up with a great solution as to how to really train a constantly changing staff, um, who are oftentimes in a hurry, like you go in a, you go in a Chick-fil-A, you know, at lunch and the, you know people are waiting like 30 minutes to get a chicken sandwich, so everyone's rushing. So in those types of scenarios it's tough. I don't know how companies can really make ensure their staff is doing it when they're getting new people all the time. There's new managers, there's new employees, there's just a lot of turnover.
Speaker 1:
Last question what's next for vPromos? As we move closer to the end of the year, are there new initiatives that you're planning to roll out in?
Speaker 2:
2024? Sure, well, we are going to be embarking on another kind of study. It's going to be more retail focused. So we're going to be looking at 15 to 20 of the largest retail brands in America and really doing the same kind of study, trying to figure out how easy are these loyalty programs for customers to use and how automated are they. Do they do a better job than the QSRs? That's kind of what we're looking into.
Speaker 2:
We also have some big. We will be balancing some big partnerships with a variety of big kind of financial institutions that essentially kind of sit in the middle of a lot of the transactions. There's a bunch of companies that kind of power the terminals and we already partnered with a bunch of the terminals, the actual physical terminals, some of those companies like Ingenico and Pax and Verifone. We already partnered with a lot of those companies. But we're going to increase some of our partnerships and now be working directly with some of the big financial institutions that are essentially kind of powering those devices. All the money is flowing through kind of their systems. So with a couple of these well-placed partnerships we will essentially make our solution available to you know hundreds more. You know large tier one, tier two restaurant and retail companies, just because we'll be integrated into the systems they're already using. So that's for us this year. It's kind of all about integrations and partnerships.
Speaker 1:
Peter, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. It was great reconnecting with you, getting a little bit more about the platform and some of the things you're seeing with regard to terminals and customer loyalty and rewards in general. Look forward to connecting with you soon. So thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. Thank you everyone for taking the time to join us for Loyalty Live. Make sure you join us back for another session soon and until then, have a wonderful day.
