Today we are here with Andrey Oskolkov, CEO of PointLoyalty for an exclusive interview. It is my hope that this will be the first of many interviews with the great companies that bring us SaaS solutions. And to start off with PointLoyalty is definitely to start off with a bang. Read on to learn why they are one of a kind!
“High costs for development and deployment of specialized management and control systems for properly calculating bonus points were always a factor that hampered the establishment of bonus loyalty programs. Implementing such systems always required significant amount of time and resources. Our company gives free online access to software product for loyalty bonus programs management tunable for any type of business, from online shop to social networks support site.” (from pointloyalty.com)
And the small businesses rejoice! 
Taiyo: Where did you get the idea for the name of your service?
Andrey: One of the company founders suggested this name. The domain was free, so we took it.
We think this name is easy to remember and it perfectly reflects the company mission.
Taiyo: What is the mission/vision of your company?
Andrey: To make establishing loyalty programs easy for every company – big or small.
Taiyo: What features of your service do you think would be most interesting to small businesses?
Andrey: Any company can start its own loyalty program for free. “Easy, free and flexible“ – written on the first page of our web site. We support the full cycle of loyalty program management – from creating loyalty programs to program members’ notification about transactions and earned bonus points.
Taiyo: How can small businesses receive the most benefit from your service?
Andrey: Small businesses can reward their clients, use loyalty programs, bonus programs as marketing tools. Earlier only large companies could use such instruments.
Taiyo: How can your service change the way a small business runs? And what new possibilities does your service create?
Andrey: Any small business company is now able to do things it previously did not even dream about because of restricted budget.
Taiyo: What motivated you to start your service? What great problem were you trying to solve?
Andrey:The Internet brings a lot of opportunities for businesses but there are no online tools available. There is a lot of hype around SaaS but there are not many quality offers especially for small businesses. We want to be among the first companies of such kind. Besides, the loyalty marketing area is not standardized yet and having a lot of experience in developing custom software in this field we tried to make a universal, simple and inexpensive solution.
Taiyo: What was the most difficult part of starting up your service?
Andrey: It is still ahead I believe. So far it was to achieve a balance between simplicity and being universal in our complex marketing sphere.
Taiyo: So, where do you see your service going in the near future?
Andrey: We make efforts to simplify our solution so it will be easier to use by small business owners.
On the other side we want to continuously extend system capabilities and introduce new useful features.
Taiyo: What is the most interesting project, feature, etc. that you are working on for your service?
Andrey: We are developing a plugin for an online e-commerce solution. It is fascinating to see how easy it is to integrate our system with customizable e-shops. We want to show our potential customers that integration is fast and straightforward.
Taiyo: What part of running a SaaS service is the most fun for you? What excites you?
Andrey: Interesting people who contact us and ways they use the service. Sometimes we are really surprised how universal our service is and how creative our users are.
It will be exciting to see how PointLoyalty evolves in the future. As the first, and so far the only (as far as I can tell), free customer loyalty program software as a service provider, they are already very unique.
Here is a quick look at the PointLoyalty interface:
As a last note Andrey told me that they would be more than glad to answer any questions on using PointLoyalty. So, dear reader, be sure to ask.
They also have a good user manual.
I know as I use the service more for myself and my clients I will have more questions and I will be sure to share the answers with you. Remember, the more we (as small businesses) help SaaS-providers the more saas-providers are able to help us. We need each other.
I really enjoyed this interview with PointLoyalty and I hope you have enjoyed it too.
Have a wonderful and saasy day!
- Taiyo J
