Service Credit Membership

Let's look at some examples of special programs that may use service credits functionality:

• Capital credits - When customers receive their utility service from a cooperative, they are considered "members" of the cooperative and may over time receive capital credit allocations from the cooperative based on their service history and the cooperative's profits allocated during that time period.
• Frequent flier miles - Perhaps your company has made an agreement with one or more airlines to allow customers to accumulate frequent flier miles for every x amount spent on service.
• Free pay-per-view movies - Maybe your cable service offers free pay-per-view movies under certain conditions. Using service credits, you can set up your system to accumulate the free pay-per-view movies and use the free movies to offset actual movies viewed by the customer.
• Any other type of loyalty program where the customer earns credits that may later be redeemed in some way.

To participate in a program such as those described above, the customer is linked to a service credit membership. The membership record provides the following functionality:

• It defines the accounts that are linked to the membership.

• It defines a membership type, which controls certain behavior about the membership.
• It may define an external ID if the membership is associated with an external program, such as a frequent flier mile program.
• It may define a service agreement to use for miscellaneous financial transactions that may get created.
• It may define characteristics used to capture miscellaneous information about the membership.
• Over time, service credit events are created for a membership. The events indicate an amount that either adds or subtracts credit units (i.e., points, miles, movies, dollars, etc) for the membership.