After you have found that you need a loyalty program you have decided to create one, there is a dilemma coming forward, are you going to do it on your own or are you going to hire an agency to do the job for you? Let’s see here the pros and cons of both options.
MONEY & TIME
Definitely one of the main reasons would be the available budget for such a tool. By choosing to outsource your loyalty program you can save money on connecting the loyalty program to your platform, on researching trends around loyalty, technical aspects, and not to mention the man-hours it takes to build the loyalty program mechanism from scratch, not having in mind that you need to be always up to date. Time, another important factor for deciding to outsource or not, how many people would you dedicate in-house to develop your loyalty program, would this slow down the development process or any other process of your company? Instead, when outsourcing a whole development team is dedicated to create your loyalty program.
COMPLEXITY
Another consideration before deciding should be the complexity of your loyalty program. What are you aiming to achieve? You want to have an Omni-channel loyalty program, you want to drive more sales, you want to become viral? How wide is the range of customer actions you like to reward through your loyalty program?
If you need a simple loyalty program that would just reward purchases, then there are great chances it could be developed in-house. But is this what you are looking for? Are your customers going to be attracted by such a loyalty program?
As long as you want more from your loyalty program, then outsourcing would be the best idea! In QIVOS, we have already the practical knowledge as we have developed a variety of different loyalty programs.
EXPERTISE
Starting a new project for the first time can be tough. There are great chances for mistakes, a lot of time for research, competition analysis, market trends etc. But you have to find everything before building your own strategy. And after you have decided your strategy you have to find out if it is possible to be implemented, and then how much will this cost you. In case you decide to go on with an agency, experts around loyalty will be responsible to create your custom program according to your needs, they know the trends, they know the right methods to approach customers, they already know the competition. The only thing that you know better than the agency is your customers, and this is something you need to pass it to the experts.
Loyalty is a really important tool for every company and implementing programs in the best possible way will help you get closer to your customers and finally increase your sales so think thoroughly before deciding if it is worth it to keep it in – house or to outsource it.
