Though bubble tea, coffee and burritos never had much in common before, they will now be linked together with the implementation of a new customer loyalty card program.
Flock Tag — a concept created by David Lin, Bubble Island owner and Business graduate student, and Business alum Adrian Fortino — is a universal customer loyalty card that provides incentives for purchases at local businesses in Ann Arbor. The goal of the program is to prevent the accumulation of multiple punch cards from various stores, since the card includes information for all participating businesses, Lin said.
According to Lin, the three businesses that currently utilize the Flock Tag program are Bubble Island, Espresso Royale and BTB Burrito, adding that New York Pizza Depot will also be adopting the program in the near future.
Lin said Bubble Island previously used a paper stamp card that allowed customers to receive a free drink after buying five beverages, but received complaints about the inconvenience of a paper card. He estimated that currently about 40 percent of Bubble Island customers are using Flock Tag.
“Over the years you hear people complaining about losing their stamp card, or having too many in their pocket, or taking too much time to find it, so it was the starting point,” he said.
Customers who get a Flock Tag can register the card in the store, and if the card is lost they can get a new one and still retain their past purchases and information, Lin said.
“(Flock Tag) just helps people to never lose their stamps again,” Lin said. “We can recover their data if they lose the card … and it just makes life easier.”
He added that while developing the program, he realized there were many other local restaurants and cafés in Ann Arbor that might also be open to the Flock Tag program.
“We discovered a lot of other businesses could use this too,” Lin said. “If anything, it would just really help the small business community out by helping us work together better.”
Brent Hegwood, general manager of BTB Burrito on State Street and BTB Cantina, said he thought Flock Tags was a great idea when Lin approached him about collaborating with the program. BTB officially implemented the program in December, and customers can get a free item costing six dollars or less when they collect ten “tags” worth at least five dollars on their Flock Tag.
“We had been getting requests from customers asking for a long time for some kind of loyalty card and we had just never found anything that worked exactly the way we wanted to,” Hegwood said. “We thought that (Flock Tag) was really cool and innovative and something that offered a chance for us to give back to our customers.”
Hegwood added that the program was great for understanding the preferences of their customers and for cross-marketing with Bubble Island and Espresso Royale.
Lin said he hopes to expand the program beyond Ann Arbor in the future, especially because both Bubble Island and Espresso Royale have satellite locations in East Lansing.
In addition to being more convenient, LSA sophomore Katrina Bixby she is pleased that they would also help the environment by reducing the use of paper cards.
“It’s good that they made the card electronic so they wouldn’t have to waste paper,” she said.