News

Improving the gift card experience

December 2, 2004

Gift cards are hot items, both for retailers and buyers, and with good reason. For the seller, they offer strong return on investment, repeated opportunities to build customer loyalty, and a great guarantee of future sales. For the buyer, they are a quick and easy way to give a gift that will definitely not end up in a closet or rushed to the return counter.

But all this potential can be squandered easily if the logistics behind a store's gift card operation aren't carefully planned and calibrated. After all, any gain in sales can be lost quickly if store personnel have to spend time looking up card balances, helping customers figure out how to use the cards or manually refilling them.

Enter St. Clair Interactive Communications, a 20-year-old company located in Toronto, Ontario, working alongside Kiosk Information Systems of Colorado. Together, they recently debuted their self-service gift card kiosk at the Digital Retailing tradeshow in San Francisco.

From a software standpoint, the kiosk is built around the common language XML, meaning that it can be configured to work with any gift or prepaid card, or PIN database that utilizes XML (including Mosaic, EWI Prepaid and others). In addition to dispensing new cards to new customers, the kiosk can be used to look up card balances, as well as purchase additional value for an existing card.

The new kiosk offers a host of attractive features to the retailer. From a business management standpoint, the machine offers a complete audit trail and control of all cards purchased and activated; this data can be cross-referenced by payment type used, merchandising campaigns and other pertinent information.

From a technical standpoint, the kiosk offers some real benefits as well. The entire system can be tightly integrated with the store's existing POS, cutting down on transaction time for both store personnel and customer.

According to Chris Peter, marketing director for St. Clair, one of the strengths of the system is its ability to offer gift cards that are not store-specific, making them ideal for malls and other retail multiplexes.

"You can walk into a mall with 200 different stores and purchase a $50 gift card for a specific store or for use within the entire mall," Peter said.

There is also the powerful psychological factor always at work with gift cards: Customers hate to think they are wasting money, so someone with a small balance on a card is likely to augment it to make a desired purchase, in order to make the most of the card. This subconscious marketing can make a big impact on a store's bottom line.