Modern retail marketing is a very different world to what it was 20 years ago. It used to be the case that customers would be generally content with good service, fair prices and a consistent in-store experience.
Now things are different. We know expectations have changed, that customers expect speed, a seamless experience across digital and in-store channels, and personalised marketing or offers in their loyalty programs.
The change is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where for a number of years now, the retail landscape has been going through a major transformation thanks to GDP growth and the embrace of digital solutions for shopping and payments.
While the strong momentum of the region’s retail sector has brought great customer experiences, expectations around service, loyalty, and efficiency continue to rise. Additionally, many retail marketers in the region are still grappling with traditional loyalty systems bound by limitations related to the point of sale.
As customers expect more personalised offers in their loyalty schemes, the technical limitations of point-of-sale (POS) systems create barriers. Conventional systems require offers created in loyalty engines to be replicated in POS systems, which are severely limited in the permutations they can handle.
This constraint means retail marketers must choose which promotions to prioritise, ultimately limiting personalisation to mere segmentation.
To solve this problem, many modern retail marketers are looking to loyalty solution providers that offer cloud-based adjudication, which both relieves pressure on the in-store point of sale terminal and harnesses the power of cloud for some major benefits.
How Retail Marketers Can Benefit From Cloud Adjudication
Cloud-based adjudication removes the bottlenecks of point-of-sale-based loyalty systems. When a loyalty customer makes a purchase, the details of their basket are analysed in the cloud via API. Any applicable offers are evaluated, discounts are applied, and points are calculated within 250ms.
Customer identification triggers the process, which analyses basket contents, locates active coupons, and applies ordering and stacking rules – promotion prioritization. Adjusted totals are then returned to the POS for completion of the transaction where new, relevant, offers can be issued in real-time across any channel (e.g. print on receipt). This approach frees retailers from POS limitations, enabling them to scale from millions to hundreds of millions of personalised offers weekly.
A powerful feature of cloud adjudication is intelligent offer ordering, which can maximise the value of promotions for customers or retailers. The system can prioritise which discounts apply based on various parameters, including offer type, account type, discount value, points earned, validity dates, and campaign tags.
For example, when a customer has multiple applicable offers, the system automatically selects the most beneficial option, such as applying a 15% basket discount instead of a smaller product-specific discount, enhancing customer satisfaction while maintaining promotion integrity.
For e-commerce and omnichannel retailers in Southeast Asia, multi-stage points fulfilment provides another significant advantage. This capability allows transactions to be fulfilled across multiple shipments, with points and discounts awarded as qualifying items are delivered.
This solves a common regional challenge where orders might contain items with varying fulfilment timeframes, ensuring customers are rewarded appropriately for each part of their order without waiting for complete fulfilment, improving satisfaction through the delivery process.
Around the world, several leading retailers have already transitioned to a real-time loyalty proposition using cloud-based adjudication to deliver hundreds of millions of personalised offers a week. These include large retail businesses like Loblaw’s in Canada, Asda in the UK and Woolworths Group in Australia, all of which use Eagle Eye as their loyalty platform.
As Mark Baxter, Senior Director for Loyalty at Asda, said: “Eagle Eye provided strategic direction from a technical perspective, but also guidance on global best practices in the loyalty space. They introduced us to other leading retailers around the world to understand what they were doing, what hurdles they had to jump over to successfully launch rewards programmes. What really stood out was the technical solution, the ability to manage that transactional layer, the wallet and to ever evolve the needs of the loyalty programme.”
A loyalty solution like this is particularly well-suited to Southeast Asia’s mobile-first consumers, who can receive offers, challenges, and suggestions all digitally, and super-quickly thanks to the speed of the cloud.
Cloud adjudication also offers protections to retailers, preventing over-rewarding, enabling efficient refund management, and fraud prevention capabilities.
How Retail Marketers Can Get Future-Ready
Without cloud-based adjudication, the loyalty interaction will be a simple verify and redeem process, with limited logic held at the point-of-sale. The other downsides of this model is that it’s expensive to make changes to, the number of offers supported is restrictive, personalisation is basic, and reliant on the POS hardware, which may be slow, leaving customers waiting longer.
Thankfully, technical barriers to large scale personalisation no longer exist. Retail marketers in Southeast Asia now have the opportunity to unlock the scope of the number of offers they can serve their customers. With cloud-based adjudication, retailers can potentially generate and serve hundreds of millions of offers.
The scale and variety that this enables will enable retail marketers to greatly customise and personalise the experiences of their shoppers, all on a fast, digital-first platform.
