We are pleased to announce that the 2021-R3 product release is complete and will be available on your service cluster on the following schedule. There is nothing required for you to take advantage of the release. Your account will be automatically upgraded in the late evening on the following date:

• Beta cluster clients:  Beta is already running the latest release
• Cluster 12 clients:  Monday, October 4th, 2021
• Cluster 2 clients:  Monday, October 11th, 2021
• All other shared clusters:  Not applicable at this time  
• Dedicated clusters:  As scheduled with your Client Success Manager

Please note: the cluster number usually coincides with your Director login page, e.g. director2.bloyal.com would be Cluster 2, and director12.bloyal.com would indicate Cluster 12. The only exception is that director.bloyal.com is Cluster 4 which will not be updated.

RELEASE HIGHLIGHTS

The release contains some important new features in addition to being a cumulative hotfix release containing fixes that have been made throughout the last several months and communicated previously via responses to support tickets logged by users. 

The key new enhancements included in this release are described below.

1. Customer Referrals - The Customer Referral capability has been enhanced with this release.  There is now a new Customer Referral entity which tracks a referral through its lifecycle of Pending, Accepted, and Expired.  This entity is shown in the Director Customers module and available as a section in each customer's Details sub-section (see below), so you can track at the customer level which customers they have referred. You may also manually convert referrals to full-fledged customers, if you wish:

There is a new Customer Referral Web Snippet that makes it easy to add a customer referral form (i.e., Tell-a-Friend form) on your website.  The customer referral snippet uses our new React-based framework for mobile responsiveness and ease of adding to your web site. 

In the Channels area of Director you will notice a new "Web Snippets Profiles 2.0" section.   This is where all new web snippets profiles are defined.  With this release the Customer Referral snippet type and the Customer Dashboard snippet types are available here (the rest are in the older Web Snippets Profiles editor.  Over the next couple releases we will be migrating all web snippets to this new snippet configuration UI.  For this release, just the Customer Referral and Customer Dashboard snippets can be edited here.

To add a Customer Referral snippet to your website, you can either use one of the certified bLoyal E-Commerce connectors or manually add the snippet to your site by clicking the COPY HTML command from the Snippet Profile to obtain the HTML you can add to a page on your site:

The Web Snippet provides the ability for the "Referred By" customer to add a personalized message that is included in the email sent to the referred customer:

The email sent to the referral customer is defined in the Customer Referral section of a Brand template (via Director in the Setup => Brands area).  You can add content just like any other email and include macros to personalize the emails sent.

When a referred customer joins, the "Referred By" customer will be set to the new customer's  profile in the Referred By customer field.   This is how the system tracks referral benefits and can be used by the promotion and Loyalty Accrual Rules you define for your Loyalty Program. When you create a rule in Director you can specify the "Target Person" to be the "Referred By" customer as shown below. This will target the award to the Referred By customer instead of the customer on the sale:

• New Customer Dashboard Snippet - We have a new Customer Dashboard Web Snippet type that provides your customers with a quick view of their loyalty program balance and any awarded coupons they can use.  Similar to the Customer Referral snippet, the Customer Dashboard snippet is built on the React framework.  You can create and edit the Dashboard snippet via the new Web Snippet Profiles 2.0 editor:

• Product-by-Product Promotion Awards -  We added a new award option on product promotions that enables you to override discounts at the product level.  This provides more flexibility and reduces the number or promotion rules required when very specific product-based promotions are needed.  This is similar to Pricing Rules where you can specify on a product by product basis what the discount or fixed price should be. 

This new feature is exposed in the Product Promotions rules editor via the "Grant award Product by Product" award option (see below)

The products included are displayed on the rule but need to added or removed via the new Discount Rule Product Award Calculations import tool where you specify the DiscountRuleCode, Product LookupCode, and Amount to discount for each of the products in the rule.

• New Click & Collect Capability - "Click & Collect" order support (i.e, order online and pickup in store) is now available without requiring full bLoyal order processing.  The Loyalty Engine now provides an API that will return all pickup enabled inventory locations that are capability of handling pickups for the items that are on the cart (i.e., have inventory available at the store location).  It will also automatically create a pickup order in for any cart flagged as a Click & Collect order.  This feature will be enabled in all new certified E-Commerce connectors and leverages the existing pickup order support available by the POS Snippets in any integrated POS system and the standalone bLoyal QuickLink application.

• Support for Read-Only POS Snippet Profiles - There is a new option on the POS Snippet Profile to create a read-only POS Snippet Profile (see below).  When this option is selected, any device that uses the POS Snippet Profile will be a read-only device so that customers can be add added but not edited at the POS. This was a requested feature for clients who want to provide POS stations where service personnel can see customer loyalty data but not update customer data. 

• Web Snippets APIs added directly to the Loyalty Engine - This is an API-specific enhancement where the Web Snippet APIs are now fully available in the Loyalty Engine directly vs. having to call a separate Web Snippets API server. This increases the performance and availability of Web Snippets and makes it easier for web developers to create custom web pages containing bLoyal functionality.  

We hope you find this release helpful for growing your loyalty customer base and maximizing customer lifetime value.   

Thank you for letting us serve you and please feel free to contact us with any questions (support@bloyal.com).  You may also contact me directly.  

Sincerely,

Rob Carney

Founder/CTO