New
The following are key new features that have been delivered with Horizon 3.3:
Form W-9 support
Within release 3.3 of Horizon we have added support for tracking when members are required to complete a Form W-9. This is relevant for all programmes operating in the USA; businesses are required to submit to the IRS when they pay contractors (in this case loyalty members) $600 or more during a tax year.
When a member redeems an offer or reward Horizon keeps track of the total perceived value of redemption's a member has redeemed during the tax year. If a redemption is going to take a member over the threshold they will be informed they need to complete a tax form and the redemption will not be allowed.
A Horizon user, with the appropriate permissions, can also update a member record to indicate a tax form has been approved. A member with an approved tax form for the current tax year will have their ability to redeem rewards restored.
The new Form W-9 capability allows for Horizon customers to set the tax year start and end dates as well as configure the threshold if it should ever change.
The next page shows an example of the new Form W-9 attributes that are stored against a contact record.
Refund rewards
Functionality has been introduced that supports the ability to refund a reward to a member. This can be done from the members wallet within Horizon.
Clicking on the refund icon next to the reward that is being refunded will display the following pop-up window:
When the refund has been completed a date time stamp, along with the details of the user who made the refund, are added to the appropriate line in the wallet.
Refund reasons can be created and managed from the Point adjustment reasons page in Loyalty management.
Improvements
The following are some key improvements that have been delivered with Horizon 3.3;
- Cloning offers; it is now possible to clone offers within Horizon
- MS3 support for cascading between media types; in order to support customer requirements and contribute to the shutdown of legacy capability MS3 has been enhanced to support cascading of messages between media types.
- Ability to export location-based custom fields; it is now possible to export location-based custom fields that exist against a contact.
- Offer statistics; we’ve improved the statistics displayed for offer views; it is now incremented when a member has viewed the actual details of the offer rather than the API returning the offer details. We’ve also enhanced the offer statistics to show impressions and display a conversion rate. It is possible for a Horizon user to reset the statistics, except for impressions, from within the offer details. This does require an update to any third party applications utilising the Loyalty Portal Services in order for the statistics to be populated correctly.
- Make the creation of an audit case optional when manually suspended a member; it is no longer mandatory to add an audit case when manually suspended a member from within Horizon.
- Consistency of card type setting via the API; the way in which the loyalty portal services handle the returning and setting of card types has been improved. This has also resulted in the introduction of a new service that returns all card types for an organisation.
Fixed issues
The following customer affecting issues have been resolved in Horizon 3.3:
- There was an issue that meant the reward point expiration date was not being set when transactions for a pending member are merged to a new member account; this has now been fixed.