Now this is something that would work for me. Rather than those stupid cards we use in the US which claim we saved X dollars by using it, instead I would love to have a mobile phone program in which I was earning real points that I could later turn in for goods and services.

A U.K. company has come up with a way to use mobile phones for a new type of customer incentive program that’s starting to catch on in supermarkets in Asia.

M Cashback has teamed up with mobile phone operators and grocery chains in Indonesia and Thailand to offer store customers credit on their mobile phones in return for buying promoted products.

The promotions work like this: a user signs up for an M Cashback rewards card, which carries his mobile phone number. He then goes shopping, filling his cart with Coke, Dove soap, Gillette razors, and other products that are part of the promotion. At checkout, the cashier scans the rewards card and the groceries and generates a receipt that includes a tally of how much credit the customer earned while shopping. Overnight, a server matches the rewards earned to the card scanned and sends an SMS (Short Message Service) saying the money has been credited to the user’s mobile phone account.

The system offers grocers a digital alternative to incentive programs such as coupon clipping, which has been tried in Asia but never caught on, and loyalty card programs, in which customers accumulate points for shopping in a certain store that can be redeemed for discounts and other offers…. Source: InfoWorld

[tags]mobile phones,grocers,customer,loyalty,indonesia[/tags]