Loyalty Programs for Greek Super Market chain
THE BUSINESS NEED
Our customer National Bank of Greece wanted to create loyalty program for its AB-VISA credit card product (Super Market co-branding card). The cardholder should gain «points» for every transaction performed with his card, depending on different promotion schemes designed by the Bank. At each billing cycle (statement), the loyalty system should accumulate the points gained and generate «vouchers» that will be mailed to the customers within the monthly statement. The system was required to be flexible in order to be used for other products in the future, with different program scenarios and different merchants.
THE SOLUTION
CSS designed and implemented within the in-house designed NBGs Card Management System a complete Loyalty back-office program (Vouchers management system). The system was modeled in such a way that it could be used for different products, with many schemes-promotions per product, for different merchants and transaction types, as well as different “vouchers”.
- The business parameters of the Promotion scheme are defined be the means of parameter files (Products, Merchants, Transaction types, Time period etc)
- A back-office operation calculates at every billing cycle the points gained for each transaction of each card depending on the active promotion schemes for the product (and on other business criteria). At the end of the billing process a “voucher” is generated for each card that has accumulated the predefined number of points and is mailed to the customer. The customer can use its voucher at selected merchants during his/her next purchase. There is a process to collect the data for the “used” vouchers through interface files provided by the merchants.
- All the financial processing (settlement) is performed either with the creation of the “vouchers”, or after they are being used by the customers and the interface files are processed by the bank. A verification check is performed before the settlement in order to make sure that the vouchers were not fraudulent. Depending on the commercial agreements made for each program, a settlement transaction is created for each merchant.
- Customer Service screens were also implemented so that the agents have a complete view of the customers records as well the points and vouchers gained.
- Reporting was designed for all parties involved (NBG, merchants, customers)
BENEFITS
Since the first implementation of the program, many promotion schemes were successfully performed for AB-VISA and the system was used to cover other Credit Card products like TOYOTA-VISA (co-branding with cars retailers) and IASO (hospital co-branding card). Hence increasing customer’s loyalty and profits for both the bank and the super marker chain.
