Business Currencies
In this blog, we describe how businesses can transform their spare production capacity or unused stock into a powerful tool for payments or rewards. This helps businesses to save cash, increase sales and profits, achieve more visibility, and engage more stakeholders.
Spare capacity
Most businesses suffer from spare capacity, or unused or underutilized resources such as labor, production equipment, inventory, or facilities, that could be deployed with little marginal costs to increase output or meet additional demand.
Some examples of spare capacity are idle machinery or production lines not operating at full capacity. Or what about unused hotel rooms, unbooked tables in restaurants, unsold stock of products ... or employees with available working hours?
Spare capacity reflects a company's potential to scale operations without requiring significant new investments. But it also results in additional costs such as extra publicity, maintenance, insurance, administration, and others. Therefore, let us discuss how to transform unused resources into a business currency for payments and rewards.
Pay suppliers
A resort hotel can pay an advertising or billboard company with available rooms instead of spending cash. The advertising company can then use the rooms to reward its collaborators or premium clients.
Investing in advertisements or publicity without spending cash, and at low marginal costs, is a very smart and profitable business strategy! The same technique can be applied to many other business cases such as negotiations with suppliers when reforming a shop or office, designing a staff training program, or just setting up a new project.
We help business to transform their spare capacity into a strategic easy-to-use tool for payments. You can use digital accounts to control barter balances with each provider or deliver physical or digital vouchers for consumption and payment at your shops or POS.
Reward customers
It is much cheaper to retain a customer than to attract a new customer. A recurrent customer is also likely to spend more than a new customer. So why not reward your customers and engage them for future purchases, in particular, if you have spare production capacity?
You can reward your customers with loyalty points for each visit to your shop or as a percentage of their spending. You may also reward premium customers with physical or digital vouchers that can be easily redeemed at your shop or affiliated partners.
We assist companies in implementing and running a customer reward or loyalty program with our dynamic, white-label, and scalable business solutions. Incentivizing continued consumer engagement at no or low marginal cost is another smart and profitable business strategy!
Reward staff
Businesses can only operate efficiently and provide excellent customer service if their staff is fully committed and engaged. Now, we all know that this is not an easy task and that continued learning and financial benefits are very important for most personnel.
Small businesses can hardly compete with big corporations to attract and retain talent and great staff. But what if we transform spare production capacity into a training program for staff and/or a reward system? Another smart business strategy!
With our dynamic, white-label, and secure business solution, companies can reward collaborators with fixed or variable income in "credits" to use in your business or affiliated partners.
Gift cards
A gift card is a prepaid card or digital voucher that allows the beneficiary or recipient to purchase goods or services up to a specific value in your stores and shops. Because it is paid today for future consumption it improves the cash flow and sales.
Gift cards can be seen as your business currency. It is a digital value that can only be used at your shops or affiliated partners. It is also very straightforward and easy to transfer from one ´person to another.
With our gift card platform, you can issue and manage both physical and digital gift cards, a QR code, or a unique number sent via email or SMS. You can customize branding and add specific rules for buying, redeeming, and expiry.
Takeaways
For many businesses, transforming spare capacity into a business currency can create a significant competitive advantage, save cash, increase sales and profits, and gain more visibility and engagement from stakeholders.
Multiple and complementary tools are available to engage stakeholders (digital wallets, gift cards, digital vouchers, or QR codes). Choose your starting strategy, evaluate, and add more features as you go!
Some sectors have a great profile for issuing a business currency like:
- Consumption companies: restaurants, hotels, beauty services,...
- Retail shops and supermarkets
- Cooperatives: production, agribusinesses, or consumer cooperatives
By fostering long-term relationships, business currencies benefit both businesses and customers, creating a win-win scenario.
A business can further transform its spare production capacity into more benefits by participating in a barter business network.