An Easily Configurable Customer Loyalty Framework Using Distributed Ledger Technologies

Abstract

The loyalty programs are one of the effective marketing and business development strategies. Solutions offered for loyalty programs are generally tailor-made and created by sector-specific software. Existing loyalty program solutions cannot offer campaign creation tools which can be used by teams, such as sales and marketing often lacking software knowledge. Personalization of campaigns for end-users, on the other hand, can be done in a limited way within the scope of existing tools. In loyalty programs where transactions and data are kept distributed among different stakeholders, establishing a trust relationship involves several difficulties. Considering the rapidly changing end-consumer expectations, in order to offer instant and automated campaigns for companies, there is a need for a customer loyalty management system, designed in a dynamic and flexible structure. In this paper, we propose a system for the user-friendly generation and deployment of loyalty programs by using a graphical programming interface. The system consists of distributed ledger technologies such as Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum, an API gateway backend structure with micro-service architecture, campaign definition interface with drag-and-drop and gamification capabilities, and a mobile application with interaction methods such as OCR, Bluetooth communication, NFC, QR code scanning, interactive map-based services, and augmented reality. The proposed system is evaluated under different loyalty use cases such as point, barter, checklist, and tier campaigns. In open, query and transfer transactions, required time to finalize transactions and transaction per second are measured and compared in different DLTs.

Keywords

Supported by TUBITAK TEYDEB (Project Number: 3190087).