We had a look at several customer loyalty systems on premise and cloud based and while we found a lot of choice from UK and USA we found very little in other markets and this made most of them incompatible with our needs in South Africa. We wanted to have something a little old school like an actual card for Mozart customers, something they could keep proudly in their wallets, and display on demand while they showed off their family photo. We didn’t just want an app for Mozart, that someone could download from the app store, don’t get me wrong we wanted to make one and eventually did, but we wanted something more, something only people that had come into the store could get, it just went well with the brand and the overall old school approach to customer loyalty.
We designed a very funky looking NFC card which is basically a credit card with a radio chip that is activated when placing it near another radio chip and that transfers a small amount of data to the attach device which then tells us who you are and how many times you have been into the store. This technology is so super cool because it looks great, an a quick contactless swipe does all the work behind the scenes.
We ordered the cards from Alibaba and got them 3 weeks later at a cost of just over R5 per card.
During the waiting period, we got busy in the lab building a great little app to manage all Mozart customers and their purchases. We decided that this needed to be a cloud based service, simply to scale this once successful and keep it centrally managed at a low monthly cost. We turned to Microsoft Azure as CSP partners but more importantly the security of customer data, the guaranteed uptime and the affordable cost for all these requirements. We created the Mozart Loyalty System in 2 weeks of development. Each loyalty card would be encoded with a unique GUID (aka unique number) that would be activated in store when I client signed up either on their NFC enabled mobile phone or a local terminal with Facebook activation or old school signup form. The cashier would then simply ask the customer to either swipe their code when purchasing or if they did not have their card on them they could repeat their mobile number they signed up with and get their loyalty points. A weekly email sent to clients lets them know their current balance and so the story goes.
Mozart can now also have one to one communication with their customers and ensure they are kept up to date with specials and events that may interest them at their favorite store.