Fostering customer engagement with flexible rewards & loyalty programs

Cloud Consulting — A Global Supermarket Chain

Case Study

Retail

PiServe helps a supermarket business to reinvent its rewards and loyalty initiatives in the cloud, catering to the customers worldwide

About the client

Headquartered in Europe, the client is a global retail market leader with a strong presence across continents. It is revered as a people-centric organization committed to maximizing customer value through innovation. Since its inception, the business has diversified into various retail formats with a commitment to play an affirmative role in regional economic development.

Abstract

The client is a customer-focused organization determined to foster favorable brand perception through innovative engagement channels and improved user experience. To this end, the business has pursued a policy of running diversified customer loyalty and rewards initiatives to incentivize attachment with the brand. However, to keep up with shifting customer expectations, the company must find the right expertise to revamp the technology landscape powering its loyalty and rewards program, making it more flexible, expansive, and secure

Business challenges

The company has leveraged its broad presence, quality commitments, and customer-centric approach to score wins in the highly competitive retail marketplace. To adapt up with the existing business realities, the client wanted to elevate its customer loyalty and rewards program, improving retention and delivering a better user experience. The retailer wished to offer more frequent promotions tailored to specific loyalty program levels.

Nevertheless, the company’s existing IT backend capabilities were coming short in meeting the objective. Therefore, to transform, the client’s decision-makers must resolve issues like:

Rolling out new offers, promotions, features, and functionalities with minimal downtime
Giving customers complete visibility and easy access to their reward point balances
Maintaining the security of promotional voucher codes delivered via the cloud
Achieving easy scalability that can support the internationalization of the program as required

Our approach

The quest for a solution led the client to PiServe, trusted across industries for its deep technical acumen, domain expertise, and business understanding. We value the confidence of our global clientele, several from the retail sector, in driving their objectives with transformational outcomes. Based on this rich experience, the PiServe team realized that the Microsoft Azure platform has the inherent capabilities to deliver precisely to the client’s needs.

Accordingly, the PiServe engineers delved into our expertise in the cloud, business intelligence, and micro-services to design and build a Microsoft Azure-based solution. We used a Scrum-based approach to accelerate development and automated unit testing leveraging Octopus Deploy. The core features of the solution include:

Extensive usage of various Azure PaaS services, including Web Apps, Azure SQL, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Storage
Completely automated deployment of the upgrades and updates from the retailer’s primary website minimizing downtime
Real-time monitoring of the cloud-native solution using Kibana and Elasticsearch

Reimagining the IT landscape to take loyalty and rewards initiatives to the customers precisely as they desire.

The result

PiServe’s intervention brought predictable value for the retailer, dramatically improving customer engagement. Among many benefits incurred, a few can be recounted as under:

Driving traffic

70% hike in customer visits to the retailer’s primary website owing to improved functionalities

Regaining lost businesses

Re-engagement of lapsed customers with attractive features like enhanced voucher usability, allowing registered users to view their loyalty point balances, voucher values, dates and deadlines, account activity, and much more