OREANDA-NEWS. If you have this huge cache of points on your Anuttara loyalty card from Tanishq and didn’t know what to do with it, now you can very well walk into a Titan store and buy yourself a wrist watch.

Taking a cue from brands which have unified loyalty cards such as Lifestyle and Max and the Reliance group with its diverse brands such as Trends and Footprint, Titan Industries has merged its loyalty programmes across three brands into one Encircle Loyalty card. Titan ran three separate loyalty programmes till recently – Vista for its Titan Eye Plus, Anuttara for Tanishq and Signet for its World of Titan.

Ravi Kant, Executive Vice-President, Corporate Communications and Unified Loyalty, says the move was primarily driven by customers who wanted to redeem points across all brand stores. “In our customer meets, Tanishq customers used to tell us they couldn’t utilise their points given that gold jewellery were all high-value items for which they needed a lot of points accumulated over a long time.” Now, customers can expend points across these three brands as well as at exclusive Fastrack stores and at Helios, its multi-brand watch chain.

The combined database of customers across all five Titan brands is huge: Eight million customers and still ticking. “A unified loyalty programme will help us in understanding and connecting with our customer base for the right strategies,” says Kant. Now Titan customers can redeem points across 950 stores of its various brands whereas earlier it was limited to only one channel.

Apart from the evident sales boost that the card can bring about, there is also an opportunity to upsell a brand. “A sale may not happen if a customer feels something he likes is expensive, but the points he has present an opportunity to redeem and pay the rest in cash.” The points are valid for three years.

Titan has had to put a common customer relationship management programme in place across all the stores as each brand’s franchisee uses different software for its sales. “The investment in marrying different systems have been high but we believe it will pay us back in the long run,” explains Kant, who also heads the eyewear business.

The Landmark group’s Lifestyle and Max stores had unveiled a unified loyalty programme four years ago when it converted its single-brand, single-format card into a multi-brand and multi-format one which said ‘earn anywhere - burn anywhere’. Kabir Lumba, Managing Director, Lifestyle International Pvt Ltd, says, “We now have over 4.5 million loyal customers.” According to him, customer visits increased substantially across brands and formats.