HAPPY- ME: ENSURING LOYALTY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

27th September 2017

GEANT leverages Mobility and 360 profiling to achieve Happy Customers and enhance revenues

Loyalty Programs have long been a staple for Customer Retention. However, as our physical and digital personas collide and boundaries collapse, it has become necessary to invest in technology solutions that can address the needs of this “phygital” world, enabled by the Internet of Things.

Levtech’s Engage 365 and Microsoft Dynamics Solution was adopted and implemented by one of the region’s leading and respected hypermarket brands, Geant. The specialized app created to deliver the loyalty program, Happy-Me, harnessed the power of mobility of Geant’s upwardly digital customer base. It is the FIRST digital loyalty initiative in the retail space in the region, underscored by use of cutting-edge features like digital Shopping lists and 360 customer profiling. At its core, the solution is built to enable Geant to thank and reward their customers’ loyalty by serving them better.

With 360 profiling, Geant is able to gather customer data, across its whopping 190 nationalities customer base! By generating relevant insights from the same, Geant is able to target its customer base better with customized rewards and promotions that can not only trigger higher sales but also help build credibility and trust. The 360 profiling feature analyses data captured across various touch points, including social listening, to map detailed personas of customer behavior. This also helps retailers plan inventory to optimum levels.

Challenge

With 35 million sales transactions in a year, Geant is amongst the leading Hypermarket brands in the Middle East and Africa. However despite those millions of transactions, Geant felt it did not truly know its customer base. In the increasingly competitive and ever evolving retail industry, it was becoming critical for Geant to start understanding their customers behavior and preferences as well as build a stronger connect between the brand and its users, by serving them better and rewarding them for their loyalty. Therefore they were seeking an insight-driven Loyalty Program that was unique, attractive and most importantly, useful, for their customers.

Client Objective

Their objective was to understand and serve their existing customers better – a simple thank you for their patronage. The intent was to drive loyalty through a customer engagement program that fed some value back to customers, eventually leading to client retention, an enhanced customer base and increased market share.

Direction

Geant wanted to leverage the significantly high level of digital penetration in the UAE market (UAE has the highest smartphone penetration in the world at 78%). Geant decided to go card-less with a mobile-app based customer engagement program. This became the first app-based loyalty program by a large retailer to go to market, and helped differentiate Geant from its counterparts offering traditional, card-based loyalty programs.

Solution

Geants’ vision led to the inception of the ‘Happy Me’ App, incorporating an all-in-one virtual shopping assistant.

Happy Me was not aimed at only commercially incentivizing customers but was also a way to make shopping fun, interactive and engaging for them. Customers could have their own personal shopping space, where they could see and avail benefits and offers customized specially for them based on their past purchasing history and buying patterns.

To work in conjunction with the mobile app, Geant needed a robust CRM application in the back-end, that could store all customer information including transactions, points earned, vouchers etc., analyse data and provide reports, profile customers, send personalised offers, and do much more. Consequently, they teamed with Levtech Consulting to implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Retail, and Engage 365 as an add-on solution.

It’s LIVE!

The project went LIVE 6 months ago, and within this short frame of roll-out, HappyMe today boasts more than 170,000 subscribers.

The app has already won the SL Award (the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Gaming & Applications) for the best shopping app of the year 2016.

The program has been launched in the UAE and will subsequently be rolled out in Bahrain and Kuwait, following which Geant expects the customer base to hit 2 million.

Highlights & wins

The impact of the Engage 365 & Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution is far reaching for Geant. Some highlights include:

• 40% increase in sales attributed to the Loyalty solution
• Dramatic improvement in customer retention rate, now at 63%
• More than 12 million screenviews and 3 million sessions
• Optimum inventory levels through data-driven demand forecasting
• Information on frequency, basket size value, customer preferences and shopping habits is helping Geant enhance basket value with customized offers and targeted marketing brochures, additionally reducing their expense of producing & distributing nearly 300000 bulk/generic leaflets every 15 days

As an example, Shopping Lists, emerged as one of the most popular features of the app, helping customers plan and organize their daily or weekly shopping better, across family members. This also fed back into Geant’s inventory planning, helping them stock-up on relevant products based on a predictive forecasting of demand born of these lists.

Simplicity of Microsoft Dynamics and a strong focus on tailoring the solution for Geants’ needs lead to Levtech’s win

Levtech’s solution won against leading international competitors and existing solution providers within Geant on account of its simplicity, ease of rollout and maintenance, total cost of ownership as well as the ability of Microsoft’s product range to integrate easily with other backend applications. Another important driver was Levtech’s ability to tailor the solution for Geant’s specific needs as well as present a strong business case and timelines planning to meet Geant’s delivery objectives. Other factors included a shorter training curve owing the Geant teams’ familiarity with Microsoft products, as well as Microsoft’s expansive partner base in the market, making maintenance much simpler and seamless.

The way ahead

The Happy Me program has already led to many a happy customer for Geant. With 60% of their customers actively using features like Shopping Lists, the information pipeline being created for Geant is massive. As more and more data is gathered, the next step for Geant would be sifting through this data pool for transformative findings and generating actionable insights from those to truly benefit their growing customer base.

Achieving the perfect balance of personalisation without intrusion remains key for the retail giant.