Loyalty programs look simple until you're running them at scale. Every customer in a loyalty program is their own entity. Their points accumulate across purchases, their tier changes when they hit thresholds, and their redemptions need to be validated and applied without double-spending. Doing this with a shared database means locking, retry logic across services, and cron jobs that periodically recalculate who qualifies for what. When a points accrual succeeds in one service but the tier upgrade notification fails in another, you have an inconsistency that's difficult to detect and expensive to fix. The longer the customer relationship, the more chances there are for these gaps to accumulate.
The Temporal Validated Pattern “Track customer loyalty points with durable Workflows” shows how to give each customer their own dedicated, durable account — one that holds state, enforces business rules, responds to purchases and redemptions in real time, and never needs a cron job to stay current.
Each customer gets their own Workflow — a persistent, running process identified by their customer ID. It holds the account's points balance, tier status, and activity history in memory. When a purchase happens, a Signal adds the points. When a customer redeems at checkout, an Update validates and applies the redemption synchronously. When a mobile app needs to display the current balance, a Query reads the state without touching the database. Tier upgrades happen as part of normal business logic, not from a nightly job. The workflow runs for as long as the customer relationship does — years if needed — and resets its internal history automatically to stay within platform limits.