The Importance of Intelligent OCR Software in a Digital Loyalty Program

From the first stamp-based loyalty system in the late nineteenth century up to today's digital cards and barcode coupled systems, loyalty programs have come a long way. With the aim to create incentives and to reward recurring customers, digitisation has changed and eased many processes around loyalty programs but its intentions. Nevertheless, digitisation by means of using OCR offers more than an easily created incentive for customers to either increase or repeat their purchases but offer the additional potential for detailed customer insights, personalised promotions, as well as a huge potential for the reduction of manual labour and reduced turnaround times for the verification and clearing processes within such programs. Within this article we will outline the roll-out of an artificial intelligence (AI) based optical character recognition application programming interface (API) used within a localised loyalty campaign for two shopping centres and highlight the core benefits of a fully automated process. Lastly, we will elaborate on the potential usage of such technologies for the generation of broader customer insights analysis.