Loyal Zoo

We were looking for a loyalty product that would not require a customer to download an app. Everyone has hundreds of apps these days, offering another one for a rare usage goes with resistance and unnecessary steps. They still have an app available, but optional for those who want it.

The sign-up at the front counter is instant. People can use emails or phone numbers to register. The app is fully integrated with Clover POS, and a few other POS to some extent. The customer gets a notification that points have been applied. They have a backend app just for staff to use for manual check-ins and quick adjustments. There is also an admin panel where you can see all the trends and general business settings. All three accesses (the customer-facing one, staff's access and the admin panel) can be open also in your browser, so you can literally open them on any device.

A nice bonus that you can send scheduled promotions to the signed-up customers via the admin panel. It is easy and powerful, the email looks professional and optimized for mobiles and desktops. The clients agree to the promos during the sign-up process and can easily unsubscribe within a promo email.

It is a fast, simple and efficient tool.

A few things that I wish could be changed or added to the app:

- The app divides customers into three categories, depending on their frequency of purchases: New, Slipping away and VIP customers. You cannot control that algorithm or place a person into a category manually when just implementing the system at your business. As an owner of a business, I like to have control of all the aspects that influence the experience at my facility, with some customers you develop more special relationships that cannot be calculated by unclear algorithms. One time a person comes as a VIP and another, as New and you can't really explain why. We are currently not using this option at all.

-The app offers your customers to sign-up for the loyalty program either by phone or email, they choose only one of them during the registration process. We could not leave the email as the only choice. I am sure it is not a big deal for the most, but in our case, we wish to eliminate phone numbers. People generally forget what they used in the first place and sometimes it creates confusion with missing points due to the multiple accounts.

Considering the cost and the load of benefits you get with Loyal Zoo, I can't really complain about anything.

Relatively easy to train staff in use of loyalty program. Our parent company (we have 2 franchise locations) set up the parameters for the redemptions, but it seems easy to set them up if I needed to do it myself.

I have run 2 promotions. The first one was a learning curve with importing graphics and text, etc. We have 2 locations and I want to run the same promo for both. It was annoying that I couldn't copy and paste the promo. I had to assemble it from scratch which took about 30 minutes. I also wish I could view the promo once I uploaded it to run. I couldn't remember the exact wording I used or the spacing. Our promos from one location to another were almost identical, but not quite. I also wasn't able to show the staff what it would look like prior to the run to prep them for what to look for.

Also, when I run a report "show transactions data", there are columns that can't be seen on the dashboard even when I minimize the menu on the left. There is no side to side scroll bar, only up and down. I am only able to see timestamp, first, last, email, phone, reward type, reward name... There is clearly another column because I can see the start of a word, but I can't access it. When I select "email transactions data" there is also reward count, customer ID, staff ID, order ID. These are not visible on my dashboard. It would be nice to see these rather than have to download a .csv every time.

I like the way it integrates with my current epos system so that I can issue loyalty points as people shop. I like the email marketing - just one email a week to promote may offers to loyalty customers ensures they keep returning.

I am frustrated that I can only send four marketing emails per month without paying more. Also, I would like to be able to attach a video/ reel to my emails rather than just flat images. Also the loyal zoo button on my epos till is slow - it takes too long to switch from the till screen to the loyal zoo screen and back again. Sometimes it gets stuck and takes forever to get back to the till screen.