Loyalty systems are conventionally used by various commercial organizations to increase customer retention as well as increase the customer base. Examples of commercial organizations may be one of a financial institution, a credit card company, an airline, a super mart, a grocery store, a convenience store, and the like. Loyalty systems reward a customer with loyalty points in return for usage of a product or a service marketed by a commercial organization. For example, several financial institutions that issue payment cards to customers reward them with loyalty points when the customer uses a payment card for shopping, dining, and so forth. The customer is able to redeem the points on the financial institution's website for goods and services from a variety of merchants assembled by the financial institution. Further, an example of a non-financial commercial organization issuing loyalty points may be an airline that rewards its customers with travel miles. The travel miles may be redeemed by the customers for that airline service when they have a minimum requisite number of travel miles in their account.
Typically, commercial organizations provide a limited range of options for redeeming the loyalty points. For example, a credit card company may tightly integrate with a merchant website and at merchant website checkout page a user having credit card associated with the credit card company can use his/her membership reward points associated with the credit card to make a purchase. Further, a retail store/in-store merchant like a super mart may issue customers with a loyalty card and provide the loyalty points on purchase of item(s). These loyalty points may be redeemed by the customers at the super mart by presenting the loyalty card at physical checkout counter of the super mart.
However, this facility of redeeming points at a retail store/in-store suffers from the major drawback that a particular loyalty card may be used for redeeming points at a particular retail store/in-store only. Further, customers may not know about total number of available loyalty points for redemption. Therefore, as per the current state of the art, the customers need to carry number of loyalty cards for redeeming their loyalty points for various retail stores/in stores. This gradually leads to deterioration in the customer's perceived value of the loyalty system, which further diminishes the loyalty to the brand. Further, loyalty cards are issued by in-store merchants and cannot be used for making any payments. The payments are made through payment cards issued by program sponsors. Thus, there exist no central utility that may assist customers in redeeming points associated with payment cards instead of loyalty cards issued by various store merchants.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds