John Crowe, the man behind Voucher Connect, combined tech expertise with hospitality savvy to revolutionize gift voucher management. Tired of cumbersome systems, he created a seamless platform that integrates effortlessly into business websites, supercharging sales. With swift delivery and easy redemption, voucher sales soared, leading to a nationwide launch in 2016.
Evolving to meet demand, Voucher Connect now offers special deals, social media integration, and top-notch fraud prevention. It’s not just a platform—it’s a sales catalyst, transforming businesses’ success stories.
Voucher Connect’s founder John Crowe is a total techie and the founder of a successful I.T company. Conversely his family’s background is in the hospitality business. Having one foot in each sector he realised the huge hassle factor surrounding sales and redemption of gift vouchers – particularly at Christmas, where staff had to be assigned solely to gift voucher admin, coupled with the year-round headache of voucher payment, delivery, and redemption.He set out to find a system that could be incorporated into the businesses that would help with this, but the few that were tried didn’t execute the sales process well, were often too expensive or there simply wasn’t enough traceability when it came to redemption.
So John decided to build a platform that could be nestled into the business’ own websites which addressed all of these issues, and which most importantly wouldn’t cause additional overheads when it came to staff costs or admin time. This proved to be the perfect marriage of tech and hospitality!!The system John built allowed vouchers be sold with instant delivery options and easy redemption features. Over the initial 12 months, the system doubled voucher sales in his family business and from chatting with other restaurant owners, there appeared to be a real hunger out there for a similar voucher solution.
So the system was rebuilt to be useable and scaleable by the wider service industry, branded as ‘Voucher Connect’, with with Stripe engaged as the payment gateway. Voucher Connect was then launched in November 2016 with the core value that it must only cost a business money when they are making money.
After an overwhelmingly strong first Quarter in business, Voucher Connect started shipping physical ‘credit-card style’ vouchers for its customers in 2017, while also adding its first international clients to its list of domestic customers. While voucher sales were once again impressively strong on the lead up to Christmas 2017, it became apparent that Voucher Connect must help boost its clients voucher sales year round. Working with developers John added to the existing platform special offer features, and discounted and bonus products, along with social-media plugins and a support desk to assist clients with event-specific promotions such as black-Friday deals and gift packages for Mother’s Day etc. These additions transformed Voucher Connect into a real voucher sales growth platform bringing massive added value for its clients.
Always conscious of safety and security surrounding online transactions, a bespoke machine-learning fraud prevention algorithm was incorporated into the Voucher Connect system in 2018. This significantly reduced incidences of fraudulent transactions that some clients were experiencing.
Having recently launch a mobile app to speed up voucher redemptions on the ‘shop-floor’, Voucher Connect is going from strength to strength and is now the industry leader in voucher platforms for the service industry.
