Has anyone used 3rd party loyalty software?

[ScruffLab]

I find the Square loyalty features quite limiting and have scoured the interweb for the best alternative that my developers can work with to achieve my desired customer loyalty program functionalities/structure.

Open Loyalty (.io) seems to have both really positive reviews and really awesome features.. and its open source and highly supported with documentation and all that.

The idea is to offer customers more robust & exciting ways to redeem points during the checkout process. So rather than being limited by the handful of options built in to square, we would inject this loyalty software in the checkout process so customers have an array of vastly superior and dramatically more exciting ways to use their points.

Question 1: To anyone who has used any 3rd party loyalty software/system in combination with Square, what did/do you use - and what are you experiences pros/cons?

The real challenge is this though:

Question 2: I know we can import loyalty points into the square loyalty system (from 3rd party systems like open loyalty), but it sort of defeats the purpose of having all this custom software developed to create a more robust and exciting customer loyalty program, if at the end of the day all I can do is merely plug in the points into Squares very limiting loyalty system... so although I'm collecting the points elsewhere, all the creative rewards and benefits I've built into the 3rd party system won't be useable in the Square POS checkout process... only the points, which then can only be used with Squares handful of simple redeem-able methods. 

So is anyone aware of any way to use a 3rd party loyalty system, and actually offer customers additional ways/options for redeeming their points - directly in the Square POS checkout flow? 

Thanks for any thoughts or assistance!!

Cheers,

Matt

[PartyManiaMD]

So, while I agree Square Loyalty has some limitations, what kind of rewards are you looking to offer? Are you looking to alter how they earn points? Or only how they redeem the points?

I use Square Loyalty pretty effectively by having customers accrue points at 1 per $1 spent and allowing them to redeem the rewards in $5 increments. You can also add non $ specific rewards depending on what you're looking to offer. Most of the appeal of Square is how integrated everything is, if you have a second I do have a feature request here regarding rewards and how it could be more robust.

If you have any specific reward implementations you feel Square is lacking let us know, it's a fairly robust system but like I said it does have room for improvement.

Happy Holidays!