Published on the 03/03/2016 | Written by Clare Coulson
Loyalty New Zealand, the company behind New Zealand’s largest loyalty programme FlyBuys, is using cloud technology to provide instant satisfaction…
The company has built a new technology platform, with the working name of LoyaltyCloud, which it describes as a core piece of infrastructure that processes transactions, manages multiple FlyBuys cards within accounts and holds members’ points balances. The multi-million dollar, multi-year implementation programme, which began a year ago, will replace a 20 year-old legacy IT system which was struggling to keep up with the expectations of its two million-plus customers.
Loyalty New Zealand CTO, Duanne O’Brien, said customers now expect to be able to engage with a modern loyalty programme in real-time and the requirement for a world-class mobile app was one of the major driving forces behind the new implementation.
The new system will deliver a real-time customer and client experience; when a customer earns points they will be available immediately, and by the time that customer leaves the store, LoyaltyCloud will have determined that they have earnt enough points to get a certain item on their wish list. The system will send them a push notification on their smartphone to ask if they want to redeem that item and pick it up straight away. It’s a massive transformation from a loyalty system where points were updated weekly and brochures of redeemable products were sent out every couple of months, O’Brien says.
LoyaltyCloud is custom-built on AWS using open source technology. O’Brien said that when they went to market last year, they discovered there was no platform that met FlyBuy’s specific “coalition-based technology needs”. Most loyalty platforms are closed-loop and currency is earnt and burnt within the same company; FlyBuys has around 55 partner businesses across which its points can be earnt and spent so they had to build their own product.
The new platform will not only allow Loyalty New Zealand to run its FlyBuys programme, but will also enable its partners to build and run their own loyalty programmes off the FlyBuys membership identifier. They will simply be able to plug into the live data on LoyaltyCloud through an API.
O’Brien believes that companies are all moving towards this more instantaneous technology model, with real-time interrogation and analysis of live data becoming the new paradigm.
