CASE STUDY

Promotion and Loyalty
Management Solution

Cloud
Retail

Project Highlights

Scope

  • Rollout of the loyalty programme across multiple European markets.
  • Migration from AWS to GCP to enhance flexibility and scalability.
  • Consolidation of duplicate customer accounts to maintain consistency in loyalty benefits.

Challenges Overcome

Overcoming AWS vendor lock-in during the cloud migration process.

Managing the complexity of 39 interconnected microservices and libraries.

Ensuring real-time data consistency and seamless integration with SAP product data.

Business Impact

The project resulted in increased revenue, improved customer satisfaction, and reduced technical debt, positioning the retailer for continued growth and innovation. These improvements have strengthened the retailer’s ability to deliver enhanced loyalty experiences, supporting their competitive edge in fast fashion retail.

Revenue Growth

Operational Efficiency

Customer Satisfaction

System Scalability

Technical Debt Reduction

The Client

The client is the central IT service provider for a leading European fast fashion retailer, managing all digital operations and IT services for the company. They are responsible for ensuring seamless e-commerce platforms, supply chain systems, and customer engagement tools.

  • Provides full IT support for the retailer’s operations across numerous European markets.
  • Drives digital innovation to optimise processes along the value chain.
  • Ensures operational efficiency and adaptability in a competitive retail environment.
Retail-Client

The Problem

Market Expansion Needs

The retailer needed a system capable of managing loyalty programme benefits across multiple European markets, including newly launched regions like Croatia, Italy, and Belgium.

Complex Account Management

Duplicate customer accounts led to inconsistencies in loyalty benefits, such as points and bonus money, affecting customer satisfaction and programme integrity.

Scalability Issues

As the loyalty and promotion programme scaled, AWS dependencies created challenges in flexibility, making it necessary to transition to a more adaptable cloud environment.

High Service Complexity

With 39 libraries and microservices managing different functionalities, maintaining the system and onboarding new developers proved challenging.

The Solution

Loyalty Programme Rollout

Successfully expanded the a loyalty programme to multiple EU markets, facilitating online store launches in Croatia, Italy, and Belgium.

Cloud Migration

Overcame AWS vendor lock-in issues to migrate critical applications to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), improving scalability and flexibility.

Account Consolidation

Implemented a solution to merge duplicate accounts, consolidating customer benefits like points and statuses, and enhancing consistency in the loyalty system.

Pricing Service

Handles product pricing across web stores, syncing with SAP to provide accurate and timely price information.

Scalable Infrastructure

Leveraged Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to support ongoing platform scalability and manage infrastructure more efficiently.

Team & Technology

Tech Stack Utilised

Backend

  • Scala 2.13
  • Kafka
  • ProtoBuf schema

Frontend

  • React
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Material

Cloud & DevOps

  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Team Composition

1 tech lead

3 backend developers

1 QA engineer

The Outcome

Increased Revenue

The expansion of the loyalty programme to new markets directly contributed to a noticeable increase in revenue as customers engaged with new loyalty benefits.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Improved loyalty programme management and account consolidation led to a smoother customer experience, boosting satisfaction and loyalty.

Reduced Technical Debt

Migrating from AWS to GCP and replacing legacy JavaScript services with Scala-based solutions enhanced the system’s scalability, flexibility, and maintainability.

Improved Back-office Operations

A new set of features optimised the management of promotions and loyalty programmes, allowing back-office users to work more effectively.

Sustained System Scalability

The use of IaC and GCP ensured the platform could handle increased traffic and transactions without compromising performance.

Streamlined Developer Onboarding

By maintaining a clean, well-tested codebase in modern Scala, new developers were able to contribute quickly, enabling faster project scaling.

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