One for the road; goodbye 2018

Another sprint to Christmas has come and gone. The frenzy of activity we anticipated for these last six weeks arrived right on time, and left after our last order date. The sales, customer service and dispatch teams will be taking a well-earned break along with the rest of the company for Christmas, which gives us a chance to think about 2018 and 2019.

There’s a few things we’d like to highlight about before we sign off for the holidays; our best blogs of 2018, our predictions for Love2shop in 2019, and what we’re proudest of from 2018.

The best Love2shop blogs of 2018

These are the five blogs that kept our readers most hooked in 2018:

  1. Half your staff want to leave and it’s your fault
  2. Customers rewards aren’t just a bribe to manufacture loyalty
  3. 19 fun things you can do with a reward voucher
  4. Long service award gifts your employees actually want
  5. Cash is a garbage employee reward

No surprise that some of the saucier posts of the year managed to land on that list. They’re some of our favourite articles from 2018, too.

Our predictions for 2019:

More adoption of digital rewards

We expect a lot more interest in our digital offerings next year. We’ve put a lot of effort into e-gift cards and digital rewards in anticipation of that. The e-gift card capacity of the Love2shop Gift Card has expanded massively, and we’ve completely revamped our Evolve Digital Rewards platform.

Customers will keep asking about vouchers

The gift voucher is still a touchstone for the Love2shop brand. Our gift cards and digital rewards have grown massively, but many customers still initially contact us to talk about vouchers. Most of them walk away sold on the virtues of our gift cards, but their initial question is about vouchers. We think that trend will continue for a bit longer before the gift card and digital rewards dominate the perception of Love2shop.

Our app will become extremely important

The expectation for quality mobile experiences increases as we increase our use of digital rewards. Our app adds a great mobile user experience to our gift cards, digital reward codes and e-gift cards. We’ll definitely see greater dependence on the app in the future, as it makes the experience of our digital and card products considerably better.

There will be plenty of change

Park Group changed considerably in 2018. Our new CEO, Ian O’Doherty, has brought fresh faces into our senior leadership team, and revealed some ambitious plans to change how Park and Love2shop operate. We’re looking forward to seeing how that plan takes shape over the next year and how we’ll be working differently 12 months from now.

Our biggest achievements in 2018

The Love2shop App

As we’ve said, our app is a big deal. It’s a massive improvement to the experience of using a Love2shop Gift Card and digital reward code. For our future in digital products, it’s a big development we’re extremely proud of.

Shout! Social Recognition

Shout! is Love2shop’ first social recognition platform, and our first software that puts recognition front and centre. We’ve deployed it internally as the Park Stars scheme, and it’s gone down a treat with our staff. Shout! is being deployed across a pilot group of clients in the new year, making the start of 2019 an extremely exciting period for us.

Straddling the end of 2018 and the start of 2019, the theme of Park and Love2shop at the minute really is change. Everything is undergoing a rapid shift, and we’ll be looking forward to employing our long history of innovation and adaptation to thrive in the new year.

From everyone here at Love2shop, we wish you happy holidays, a merry Christmas and a happy new year.