Loyalty tiers set by staff, then by till spend
How loyalty tiers work in Achekam's Retail pack, who sets them, what till sales on a customer's timeline add, and how to keep tiers fair.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Retail businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
Every shop has customers it would hate to lose. The owner knows them by name: the contractor who buys every month, the family that sends their friends in, the collector who wants a call the moment new stock lands. The trouble is that this knowledge lives in the owner's head. When the owner is away, nobody else knows who gets the phone call.
Loyalty tiers put that knowledge on the record. In Achekam's Industry CRM, the Retail & e-commerce pack gives each customer a tier, and once till sales appear on the customer's timeline, the people setting tiers can see what each customer has actually spent. This article explains how that works and how to keep the tiers fair.
Standard, Silver, Gold and VIP
The Retail pack has four tiers: Standard, Silver, Gold and VIP. Every customer has one.
Four is enough to separate occasional buyers from your best customers without turning the scheme into a points system nobody understands. What each tier earns, whether early notice of sales, first refusal on special-order stock or a personal call when something arrives, is your decision. Decide it before you assign a single tier, and write it down.
A person sets the tier
A tier is set by a person. That is a feature, not a gap. Loyalty is not only about spend. A customer who refers three friends, or who has bought steadily from you through a bad year, may deserve Gold even if their totals look ordinary. A person can weigh that; a formula cannot.
The risk is the opposite one: tiers that reflect who staff like rather than how customers behave. That is why the written rules further down matter.
Till sales on the customer's timeline
The Retail pack records customer special orders and returns, but most of what a shop sells goes through the till. Till sales are now linked to the customer's timeline in the CRM as well.
That changes what a person sees when they set a tier. Instead of relying on memory, they can open the customer and read the purchases: how often, what kind of goods, whether spending is growing or tailing off. A customer whose till purchases have stopped is worth a call regardless of tier.
The pack's home-page counts are also read from records, tasks or the ledger, never typed in by hand, so the figures a manager sees there reflect what has actually been recorded.
Using till spend to set a tier
Setting a tier directly from till spend is planned for a later stage of the pack. For now, the person setting the tier reads the spend on the timeline and applies your rule.
That is a good moment to make the rule explicit. A workable approach:
- Decide a review period, such as the last twelve months.
- Decide what spend in your own currency, rand, naira or shilling, moves a customer up to Silver, Gold and VIP.
- Decide what else can move a customer up: referrals, long custom, trade relationships.
- Decide when a customer moves down, and give them notice if they do.
- Review tiers on a fixed day each quarter rather than whenever someone remembers.
When automatic setting arrives, a rule written this way is ready to apply, and customers will see no sudden change in how they are treated.
A tier review in practice
Take a builder who has bought from you for several years. On review day, a manager opens the customer and reads the timeline: till purchases most months, a special order for a batch of tiles last season, and a referral noted against a new trade customer. Spend alone puts the builder in Silver under your rule; the referral and the long custom are on your list of reasons to move up. The manager sets Gold and records why. If the builder ever asks, the answer is on the record, and anyone else applying the same rule to the same history would reach the same tier.
Rules that are fair and can be explained
A customer who asks why they are Silver and not Gold deserves a straight answer. Some guidelines:
- Write the rules down and keep them where staff can read them.
- Record the reason whenever a tier is set for something other than spend.
- Keep staff relationships out of it. A cashier's friend is not a VIP because they are a friend.
- Separate tiers from discounts. If a tier carries a price benefit, set it through your normal discount approvals, not as a favour at the counter. Setting cashier discount limits explains how those approvals work.
- Keep notes factual. Record buying behaviour and preferences, not opinions about the customer.
Watching the effect in your figures
A loyalty scheme is supposed to keep good customers coming back. The ledger tells you whether it does. Revenue from till sales sits in the books, as set out in what a till sale posts to your books, and with till sales on customer timelines you can see whether Gold and VIP customers keep buying after they are told about their tier. Harvard Business Review's refresher on the value of keeping the right customers explains why keeping customers costs less than winning new ones, and which customers are worth keeping.
Refunds matter here too. A VIP who returns most of what they buy is a different customer from one who keeps it; refunds, voids and store credit at the till explains how returns are recorded.
Before anyone touches a customer record, agree what each tier means and how a customer earns it. The tiers are easy to set. Keeping them meaningful takes a written rule and a regular review.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
