Respond Phase

As stated earlier, in the Respond Phase, a Customer navigates to the Shop's Listing and chooses to interact with that Shop, either on-premises or remotely.

Particularly, the Customer may view the Shop's Discount Policy, respond to Interactions, request that the Scoring Engine score those Responses, and use the Points accrued from doing so to obtain Coupon Proposals based on the Shop's Discount Policy.

View Discount Policy

While the Customer may skip this step, it is often desirable to the Customer to review the Discount Policy (both Overall and Product-Group-specific), before responding to Interactions. Doing so informs the Customer about whether they will be able to obtain the type of discount that they desire from the Shop.

While performing this step, the Customer is presented with a navigable Tree View of Product Groups, with Overall always presented as the top-most node. By clicking on a specific Product Group node, the Customer selects which information from the Shop's Dicount Policy is displayed.

If the Customer does NOT find the Shop's Discount Policy enticing enough to motivate any Responses, the Customer may register that deficiency so that the Shop is notified by our System.

Respond to Interactions

If the Customer does find the Shop's Discount Policy compelling enough to respond, the Customer can navigate to the Shop's list of available Interactions, which were defined and configured in the Shop's Interaction Policy.

For any Interaction to which the Customer wishes to respond, the Customer can click on the prompt for that Interaction and navigate to a screen for specifically providing Answers as a Response to that Interaction. Often Response Answers are text based, but Answers can come in other forms, such as taking picture(s), providing file(s) to upload, or selecting Product Group(s) from a Tree View.

Furthermore, each Answer in a Response may contain multiple Answer Parts, in which case information is specified at the Answer-Part-level (not the Answer-level).

Additionally, when the Customer provides an Answer (or Answer Part), metadata such as GPS location is also recorded, as some Scoring Criteria may take into account the Customer's physical proximity to the Shop.

Score Responses

Upon the Customer providing one or more Responses, that Customer will be presented with the option to request that these Responses be scored.

When the Customer initiates such a request, the Scoring Engine will automatically score all Responses that correspond to Interactions that DO NOT contain any Answer Parts that are configured for "Manual Scoring". If one or more Answer Parts in the corresponding Interaction do require "Manual Scoring", our System notifies the Shop that such scoring is necessary and provides the means to perform this scoring on a Response-by-Response basis. Nevertheless, when a Response requires "Manual Scoring", but also contains Answer Parts that can be scored automatically, our System may provide a Provisional Score for use by the Shop in determining the Manual Score.

After our System has completed the scoring process, the Customer will be presented with a Point Score by Response, as well as a Total Score for the set of Responses.

Additionally, if the Customer has earned Bonus Points through usage of our System, then those Bonus Points will also be presented to the Customer at this time.

Obtain Coupon Proposals

Upon earning a positive, non-zero Point score, the Customer will be presented with the ability to create Coupon Proposals using their available Points.

Each Coupon Proposal is a recommendation for a discount at the time of purchase based on the Customer's Points allocated to that Coupon Proposal and the Shop's Discount Policy as it relates to that Coupon Proposal. Coupon Proposals can be specified at the Overall level or the Product-Group-specific level, depending on the Shop's Discount Policy and the Customer's preferences.

Furthermore, the quality of the discount recommended in a Coupon Proposal is directly determined by the number of Points allocated to the Coupon Proposal. As such, the manner of how Points are allocated to Coupon Proposals is very important, especially in cases where more that one Coupon Proposal is created is the same batch.

Currently, Point allocation is performed automatically, but in the future, the Customer will be able to directly set the number of Coupon Proposals created, the number of Points allocated to each Coupon Proposal, and the Product Groups to which the Coupon Proposals apply, so long as the values that the Customer specifies are within the bounds set in the Shop's Discount Policy.

Upon creating new Coupon Proposals, those Coupons Proposals will be added to the list of Active Coupon Proposals displayed to that Customer.