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About Siebel Loyalty Redemptions

Customer loyalty programs are designed to recognize and reward frequent users of a company's products and brands, or those of the company's partners. A Rewards Program can offer its members a number of opportunities to accrue and apply points toward redemption awards.

Using Siebel Loyalty, companies can develop and implement loyalty programs and redemption awards that allow them to remain competitive and differentiated in the market place. These redemption opportunities increase customer satisfaction, while allowing the company to manage the liability associated with member points accruals.

Siebel Loyalty provides Web services application programming interfaces (APIs) that support redemption through third-party systems. For information on these APIs, including what the APIs do along with details of their input and output arguments, see Siebel CRM Web Services Reference.

Loyalty programs can help increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty by:

• Providing innovative redemption offerings which meet the program member's needs and which match the evolving trends in the loyalty marketplace.
• Offering redemption products which a member can redeem using a lower number of points than competitive loyalty programs.
• Offering the points-plus-pay pricing option.

A typical Siebel Loyalty redemption process includes the following steps:

1. The program member requests a redemption.

   The member chooses an available redemption product from the catalog and makes a redemption request with the Loyalty operation, or by using a self-service process.

2. Siebel Loyalty:
   1. Checks the members eligibility in the program.

      Siebel Loyalty checks the member's eligibility for the redemption, based on the member's current membership status. For example, if the member has a pending payment to be made to loyalty program operations from an earlier transaction, then the member's current status is pending payment, and the member is ineligible for a redemption.

   2. Checks the availability of the product.

      For an airline redemption, Siebel Loyalty checks whether or not a redemption seat is available on any partner airline flying from the selected origin city to the destination city in the reservations inventory (RES system). For a nonflight redemption, Siebel Loyalty might bypass this check. Note that checking for the availability of a seat is done outside Siebel Loyalty.

3. The member selects the product for redemption.

   The member selects the redemption product, for example, an airline flight from Sydney to San Francisco or a five-star hotel stay in Paris.

   Note that multiple products can be redeemed in one redemption request.

4. Siebel Loyalty quotes a price for the redemption product.

   Siebel Loyalty provides the member with the price in points, or points-plus-pay (in a currency), for redeeming the selected product.

   You can convert points to cash payment, or obtain a loan to redeem the product in the redemption request. There can also be multiple point types in the same redemption request.

5. The member accepts the quote.

   The member accepts the quotation in points or points-plus-pay.

6. Siebel Loyalty:
   1. (Optional) Checks the member's credit.

      After the member accepts the redemption quotation, Siebel Loyalty optionally performs a credit check to ensure the member has a sufficient points to undertake the redemption. As some loyalty programs allow members to create a redemption request and process the request at a later time, this step is optional.

   2. Creates the redemption request.

      Siebel Loyalty creates the redemption request to be retrieved at a later time.

   3. Checks the member's credit (mandatory).

      After creating or retrieving a redemption request, Siebel Loyalty performs a mandatory credit check to ensure the member has sufficient points to undertake the redemption.

   4. Invokes a credit card payment.

      If a currency payment is required, then Siebel Loyalty invokes a credit card payment through a payment gateway and collects the payment.

   5. Debits the member's points balance.

      Siebel Loyalty debits the required number of points from the member's point balance based on the quotation accepted by the member in Step 5.

7. In some cases, the member redeems points to receive a voucher that can be used with a partner at a future date to use nonflight products. For example, the member might get a voucher that can be used for a one-day car rental or for a one-night stay at a hotel. The following steps are optional and only occur when the member receives a voucher:
   1. Siebel Loyalty generates and issues a voucher.

      In some cases, Siebel Loyalty generates a voucher with a unique voucher number and an expiry date. If a voucher is required, then Siebel Loyalty initiates an outbound process to issue the generated voucher to the member for a future-dated nonair redemption. If the process involves an air redemption, then the loyalty program issues an electronic voucher or a redemption log number to the partner or travel agent, who in turn, issues an airline ticket to the member.

   2. If required, you can use an application such as Oracle Business Intelligence or another third-party application to calculate the price to pay to the partner for the redemption product.
   3. The member redeems the voucher.

      The member presents the voucher to the partner to use the partner product. If this redemption is for an air redemption or for nonair products ordered from a catalog, then this step might not be relevant.

   4. The partner:
      • Validates the voucher. The partner validates the redemption voucher for a valid membership, valid product details (for example, duration), expiry date, and so on, with the loyalty program operations. This step enables loyalty program operations to flag the voucher as Reserved, and prevents the member from using the same voucher with another partner. A receipt number can be issued to guarantee the use of the voucher to the partner.
      • Provides the product or service. The partner provides the product or service based on the redemption voucher presented by the member. For airline partners, the intermediary or internal partner first issues a ticket for the itinerary, and then the member uses the same voucher for flight redemption.
      • Sends an invoice for payment. After the customer uses the voucher, the partner sends an invoice to Loyalty Program Operations to claim the payment.
   5. The Loyalty finance department pays the partner. The loyalty program's finance department reconciles the invoice with the used voucher and pays the partner the computed payable amount.

      Vouchers can be used differently for flight and nonflight redemptions. For more information about vouchers, see Points-To-Pay Conversion.

Real-Time Processing of Redemptions

Siebel Loyalty implements the ProcessRealTimeRedemption method of the LOY Redemption Web service to reduce the processing time of real-time redemption transactions. The ProcessRealTimeRedemption method performs the following tasks in the redemption process as separate steps:

1. Checks the member's credit and displays a message about the status of the transaction.

   The ProcessRealTimeRedemption method:

   • Performs the member credit check, taking into account any redemptions that are pending for the member

     NOTE:  If the member does not have sufficient points for the redemption transaction but is eligible for a loan, then the ProcessRealTimeRedemption method processes a loan transaction for the member, then returns a status of Successful for the redemption transaction.

   • Displays a message to the member confirming that the redemption transaction was successful, and provides a transaction number
2. Processes the redemption transaction and debits the member's points balance.

Siebel Loyalty updates members about the status of their redemption request and only then completes the transaction by debiting the points from members. By performing each task separately, the time members wait for a response to their request is reduced, as is the total time taken to process the request. For more information on the ProcessRealTimeRedemption method, see Siebel CRM Web Services Reference.