COLUMN
5WS WITH KICKSTART
by Frances Barsana
The A to Z-ap of
Mobile Loyalty
Program
Frances Barsana helps
companies in their digital
transformation journey by
connecting them with the
most innovative technology
startups in the market. She
helps build strategic and
commercial partnerships
between best-in-class tech
startups and top1000
corporations in the
Philippines and in
Southeast Asia.
In this column, we go straight to the source of innovation and ask their 5W’s: Who, What,
Why, Where, and When to get to the driving force behind an innovation and a better
understanding on its application in our digital journey.
Who (Name, Designation, Function)
Dustin Cheng, Co-Founder and CEO, serial
entrepreneur. Prior to ZAP, I bootstrapped a
group-buying website called Deal Dozen. It
was the trend back in 2011, shoppers could
get 50% off on restaurant, spa, and travel
vouchers online. It was a great experience
for me and my co-founders, but we
recognized it was a saturated industry prone
to market fatigue. Eventually, we sold the
company to Singapore-based Asia Deal Group
in 2013, and started ZAP.
Why (why did you invent this, problem are you solving)
We built ZAP because of what we learned from running Deal Dozen:
thousands of retailers would run these voucher deals, get mobbed by
customers, and then nothing. The promise of discounting in exchange for
marketing never truly materialized - customers barely returned, and the
retailer would have zero data. They were operating blind, and we felt
there’s got to be a better way of helping merchants engage with their
customers in a more meaningful way.
Sure, retailers had data from POS
transactions. However, these transactions
did not have a face to them. No name,
number, no customer data. You knew you
sold 100 blue jeans, but who bought them?
This was when we realized that there was
a huge gap in the offline retail world. While
e-commerce stores can track every click on every page, view abandoned
carts, analyze Customer Lifetime Value, non-returning customers, and a
plethora of other data points per transaction, offline retailers had very
little data. This was what we set out to change.
What (Brand, Product, What did you build)
We asked ourselves: what is the best way to connect the customer to the
transaction? How do we ensure that the experience is 10x better for the
business owner, the customer, and everyone else involved in every single
transaction? Our solution: a mobile-based loyalty program that captures
customer behavior in real-time.
We started out by understanding the profiles of customers and how they
engage or behave on-premise. In parallel, we understood that merchants
need to deliver a frictionless store experience to customers. Ultimately, we
created in 2013 the first mobile-number based loyalty program in the
Philippines. Your mobile phone is now your loyalty card. With ZAP, we
envisioned customers no longer experiencing the hassles that come with
carrying a loyalty card or downloading an app as a requirement to enjoying
customer incentives.
By going mobile- first, a customer visiting his or her favorite store the first
time or tenth time, the experience will be the same: no forms to fill up, no
app to download, and you earn your points in 5 seconds.
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As for the merchants, they are now able to tie a specific POS transaction to
a specific customer by using the mobile number as customer ID -- now, you
will know who your customers are, how many times they’ve been to your
store, what items they purchased, and send a satisfaction survey as well.
Now you know which customer has bought a pair of blue jeans store within
a year, or a pair of blue jeans every other month from your store. ZAP
allows this level of customer insighting for merchants because our
technology solution integrates with any POS seamlessly, most of the time
with zero customization needed from the POS provider. They don’t even
know we’re there!
Every
ZAP-accredited
merchant will
be provided
with an
analytics and
promotions
dashboard that
shows customer
transactions
from all the
stores in real
time.
Merchants can
also segment their customers by spending category, frequency of visit, and
items most purchased, which gives them context when creating
personalized marketing campaigns. Understandably, time is gold for
merchants so ZAP’s automated re-marketing tool, which is designed to be
a “set and forget solution,” allows store personnel to do more: create a
campaign, set the parameters, and bucket customers into the appropriate
campaign for automated re-marketing. And because conversions are now
tracked and measured via ZAP, marketing teams can extract ROI for each
campaign.
Basically, ZAP helps eliminate guess-timates for customer relationship
management.
Where (in, or to what situation, position, direction, circumstances, or
respect, where does this plan lead)
Our goal is to help all merchants do business better. We do this by providing
them with tools to that extend their offline businesses to online. Through
ZAP, business owners can expect to capture every interaction from the
moment the customer steps into your door, to the moment they come back.
When (when you use xxx you will
xxx)
When you use ZAP as a merchant, it’s
like looking at customers differently
for the first time. Customer data that
you had no way of accessing before is
now at your fingertips. Customer data
that used to take weeks to gather
now takes seconds.