Overall Conclusion A large percentage of organizations use loyalty programs in their marketing efforts so to encourage customers to keep buying their products. Organizations use loyalty cards, rewards cards, advantage cards, and many others to identify individuals who are members of a loyalty program. The principle aim of loyalty programs is to attract many customers to a business and eventually increase competitive advantage therefore allowing an organization to make more profits. Individuals with loyalty cards are given discounts, coupons, gifts, and others as a reward for goods bought especially if the total price exceeds a certain amount. In issuing loyalty cards, organizations divide their shoppers into different groups depending on the buying behaviors of the different groups (CRMTrends 4). Some of these groups are based on gender, age, ethnicity, sex, lifestyle, and others. Some organizations collaborate with others so as to make the program more efficient. Organizations conduct some research so that they can obtain important information before implementing the loyalty program. Most of the organizations that have employed the program have acquired a worthwhile return on investments. However, some organizations do not employ the program but use other methods to acquire higher profits. Segmentation “CVS believes that segmentation enables merchandising, marketing, operations, and other teams to have a common language when talking about their customers”. This statement means that segmenting the customers into groups according to their needs have many advantages to all the teams in the organization. This is because the different teams identify the different groups of customers in the same way, that is, according to their needs. The merchandising team will be producing goods depending on the needs of the different teams. The marketing department will be approaching customers depending on the needs of their groups. The operations team and the others will approach the customers in a similar manner. This means that in dealing with the customers, all the teams in an organization will give them the same approach. The groups will then communicate about their customers in the same language because they have been dealing with them in the same way. Collaborations Collaborations between retailers and such information specialists as Emnos and Retalix are quite valuable. This is because such specialists offer services that allow the retailers to be customer focused (Enterprise solutions team 2). The services they provide allow retailers segment customers according to their needs, improve pricing and promotion policies, and develop better assortments. They also provide and implement loyalty software to retailers. Such software is used to integrate and manage promotion and loyalty functionality. Retailers use such specialists in different locations where they operate. The services they provide help retailers manage multiple store locations and handle customer needs. Retailers that collaborate with information specialists are more successful than those that do not collaborate. At the end of the day, retailers that collaborate with information specialists provide more efficient operational and customer service levels. This adds to their competitive advantage over other retailers offering similar