Service Credits Earned When Starting Service

For some memberships, you may want to add service credits when starting the program. For example, the customer gets three free pay-per-view movies when signing on for cable service. Or a customer receives 500 frequent flier miles for signing up for a combination of gas and electric service.

There are various ways that you can accomplish this. You should work with your implementers to consider the various options to determine the method that best suits your business practice.

• You could use an SA activation algorithm to create a membership and an event for the initial points. Use this method if the points are related to a single type of service agreement and the points are earned automatically when starting service (i.e., without any human decision to be made).
• You could use a membership creation or membership activation algorithm to generate a service credit event automatically. This method assumes that the decision to create the membership has been made and that the free initial points are always earned for this type of membership (i.e., regardless of the type of service created).
• You could use questions and miscellaneous fields for a campaign/package to determine a customer's eligibility for participation in the membership and for the initial free points. A column reference posting algorithm could create the membership and/or the service credit event for the free points based on the answers to the questions.
• Perhaps the initial free points are only earned after the first bill is generated. Use a bill completion algorithm to generate the initial points.

You may think of other plug-in spots that could be used to generate free initial points based on your business needs.