Choosing the Technology
The technology infrastructure driving many customer loyalty initiatives has become increasingly complex, with recent developments such as instant rewards at the point of sale. Selecting the most appropriate technology platform to support the business strategy of a loyalty scheme not only requires specialist knowledge, but real experience.
Many of LCUK’s clients have stuck with the classic software solution purchase and in-house operation. Inevitably this leads to a complex integration project, linking up all the data feeds to deliver a consistent loyalty treatment that in many instances span more than one customer channel. When you’re implementing such system, data management shouldn’t be an afterthought. Our expert consultants have the knowledge and experience to help you find viable solutions, plan the deployment and manage the all-important data. We work with our clients to identify a range of options or to assess the feasibility of an identified approach. With our help you can be confident your system will deliver key processes and functions with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
Whether it’s the integration of existing legacy systems with a new loyalty platform, or designing an end-to-end system testing strategy prior to going live, we’ve been there. We’ve worked with many reliable solution providers and outsourcing agents, as well as helping clients develop systems infrastructure in-house.
Specifying any IT system is about making it fit for purpose. That includes anticipating issues, such as function and capacity requirements. Mistakes can be costly, not just in additional investment and lost revenue, but also in productivity terms. What’s more, as your loyalty programme develops, your marketers will want to understand its effects and apply ever more complex loyalty strategies.
There’s also the issue of data integrity. This is particularly relevant when working with legacy systems feeding critical data to the loyalty operation. The loyalty rationale is built on a continuous process of customer understanding. Therefore, data design must be at the heart of your loyalty programme strategy from day one. Time and time again we have saved customers from making costly mistakes that would only have become apparent once the programme was up and running.
We have refined and proven methodologies that ensure optimal design of your loyalty platform. Our experienced technicians understand loyalty and will ensure that the deployment is a success. Our ‘best practice’ approach addresses critical design requirements:
- Business requirements – capture, interpretation and confirmation. This is about ensuring the system functionality will deliver the ‘business loyalty vision’.
- System integration requirements. For a customer loyalty scheme to function effectively, you need an interactive ‘data warehouse’ to store and track all customer interactions, rewards/points, rules and transaction data. This data warehouse interacts daily with other resources, such as retail point-of-sale or billing systems. Continuity and integration are essential so that you maintain consistent and accurate customer account information.
- Business critical milestone and process definitions. These are the building blocks of a ‘go live’ strategy.
- Scheme performance measurement. An essential part of every loyalty programme is the ability to understand its impact in influencing customer behaviour. Our technicians will work with you to build a reporting suite that provides detailed customer insight.
- End-to-end testing strategy. No loyalty implementation can go live without absolute confidence in the system’s robustness. Our consultants can provide a comprehensive test plan designed to thoroughly check every aspect of the system’s capabilities before declaring it ready for use.
- Training strategy. We’ll ensure that your organisation has a comprehensive training plan that ensures the key members of your organisation not only understand the system and how to use it effectively, but also the strategy and the operational processes that, in combination, deliver a successful loyalty implementation.
