Synergie Holdings, the North West family-owned group of forecourts and convenience stores, is set to adopt what is claimed to be the first loyalty app to directly integrate seamlessly with most touch-screen tills, The Grocer understands.

Loyalzoo, a check-in-based app, negates the need for customers to scan barcodes to retrieve loyalty points, unlike with most loyalty apps, according to director Mark Ryan.

“Customers just have to check in from the app to tell the merchant they are in the shop and once they do that, their name pops up on the merchant’s till. The merchants get to know the customers by name and give loyalty points by selecting the person who has checked in.”

With the pre-existing non-integrated app, staff chose the number of points to give to the customers. On the PoS integrated solution, the purchase data is captured so staff do not have to choose the number of points.

The integrated PoS will already know how much the customers have spent in-store and will automatically allocate the points which customers receive by “push” notification to their mobile device.

All staff have to do is select the person and the customer is automatically given points.

“There’s nothing else like this out there,” Ryan said.

He said apps that used Quick Response (QR) code technology was “messy” for customers. “So many customers would not scan a code in their local shops and shops that have them have come to us saying it doesn’t really work for them,” said Ryan.

Loyalzoo is working on several other PoS system integrations including the Clover platform. The integration was piloted at the London School of Economics, where it is used at two cafés run by the students’ union.

Loyalzoo says the new PoS-integration provides “big tech and data to smaller retailers in a way that has previously only been accessible for the bigger brands”.

The existing basic non-integrated app costs £27 plus VAT a month. PoS integration costs £57 plus VAT a month and a one-off set-up fee of £319 plus VAT.