Case Study

Loyalty Management Portal

Payback’s Online Shopping System

Client Profile

Awarded the best "Customer Loyalty Program" award by Asia Retail Congress, iMint is known as the common element between brands, retailers and local merchants that could deliver a superior shopping experience.

Some brands were running their own loyalty programs but consumers were disillusioned with these programs as they did not see value in them. It took too long to collect points and mostly, the points could be redeemed for items that had a poor perceived value. Also, there were too many cards in the consumer's wallet.

That's when the idea of iMint was conceived whereby a single card could be used across a network of brands and local merchants to accumulate points. A consumer would have to carry only one card and all the points that he earned across different categories of spends would get aggregated on one card. Hence, a consumer can earn large number of points quickly and redeem them for better rewards.

Business Situation

The previous design of the portal had availability issues. The downtime was severe and significantly high crippling the operations. The user interface and user experience had failed to live to the expectation of the stakeholders and customers. The customers were not able to redeem points due to the outage resulting in unacceptable portal behavior and bad user experience. When the business grew in size with more vendors being pooled to offer their products, the portal failed to scale and cost the company dearly.

It was a typical Java/J2EE portal built with MySQL as backend and hosted on Apache. While the setup was in place, the system had many issues with regard to handling and development of code. When there were concurrent users, the load test failed and the portal shut down. When more vendors wished to showcase their products, the system could scale only beyond a number and crash thereafter. Hence, from a technical and business standpoint, it was decided to scrap the entire project and start ground-up.

Solution Approach

The client approached Compassites initially to create a user interactivity module. Eventually the scope was expanded to cover the development of the entire portal. Compassites went on to create the portal ground-up by restructuring the portal using Java\J2EE. We built a reliable front-end by bringing onboard the most user-friendly features and handled the performance issue with a judicious mix of business acumen and technology edge. The various features there were built later into the portal greatly enriched the user experience.

With the change in layout, logo and multi-features, more vendors came forward to exhibit their products and customers were more than willing to redeem their points as the uptime was to a close 99.9%. It was a phenomenal achievement in a timespan of just 5 months, by which the system was rigorously tested, soft launched and then taken live for production.

Technology Used

Developed in J2EE environment which includes MySQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript and SpringWebFlow.

Benefits & Results

The redemption increased by 70% and the number of online customers and vendors increased.
The user experience went up, so did the comfort factor.
There was no outage faced ever since and downtime became a rarity.
The portal became very consistent and reliable in terms of behavior.
We enabled the client to articulate their business models effectively.