At the Scottish Instuitute for Enterprise, a United Kingdom based startup called Swipii (@Swipiicard) won “The Best New Venture for 2014” award. Swipii offers a customer loyalty program for independent small and medium sized businesses. Swipii was created by Chitresh Sharma and Louis Schena. They are both international marketing graduates from Strthcylde University and received £10,000 prive to help them with Swipii.
The idea behind Swipii is that there are no platforms that are accessible to small and medium sized independent businesses to join the digital customer loyalty programs, which continue to only gain in popularity. Swippi was created to bridge that gap and take independent business out of the age of stamp or punch cards and bring them into the digital age of customer loyalty.
Businesses can set up a table facing their customers to allow them to use Swippi. From there, customers can use their free Swippi card or mobile application to build up loyality. Best of all, Swippi will work for multiple business. The idea is to have all small business in an area use Swippi for their customer loyalty. That way, it is only one application for the customer to use and download, and it builds support among small business in the area.
The larger goal of Swipii is to help small business build loyal customer bases through individual rewards that fit a companies culture and values. In an article with PRWeb on April 14th entitled “Innovative Customer Loyalty Company Swipiicard Wins ‘Best New Venture of 2014’ Award”, Swipii’s COO Louis Schene provided this explanation of Swipii’s goals:
“We want to redefine customer loyalty by creating custom and unique loyalty rewards programs which are tailored to individual businesses in order to reflect their store culture, objective and personality of their owners. Our plan is to go against the existing trend of creating short term sales by working closely with small and medium sized businesses to help them bring their customers back more often.”
Louis Schene envisions Swipe as an application that will increase customer flow at small and medium sized businesses. Stores will be able to create their own fun rewards, that can be as simple and silly as saying that customers will receive high fives from staff after their purchase or as special as free classes that pertain to the business.
Swipii is setting out to help small business do what large corporations have already found to be extremely successful: provide mobile customer loyalty programs that reward customers for participation in unique ways. Is the world ready for it?
