SAA had been using a tailor-made legacy system built over time, to host and maintain the Corporate Loyalty Program, just as Voyager used to be before moving to the iFly Loyalty platform. The platform initially served SAA's goals and strategy but over time it became difficult to maintain and also expensive for even the smallest of changes. Shortage in relevant skill-sets became a pain point as well.
China Eastern Airlines (CEA), after its merger with Shanghai Airlines (FM), faced the mammoth task of consolidating the member base of FM under its own flagship loyalty brand – the Eastern Miles. Handling the combined member base through legacy system was expected to fetch less than optimal results.
Since its inception in 2007, our customer has pursued its business agenda to identify new segments and explore key loyalty drivers to influence the customer behavior in the identified segment. Such a refined approach has helped the company to offer distinct loyalty proposition for targeted customer segments.
Existing platform that runs two loyalty programs were facing difficulty in scaling up with the growth of the loyalty propositions. Hence, the primary objective of the customer was to move away from the existing system's nonflexible and poor architecture which was difficult to maintain and could not adapt to accommodate changes in the desired time.
The customer initiated the process of joining the Star Alliance network some time earlier as part of its long term business strategy. However, the airlines had to put in place a system to meet the demanding Star Alliance requirements.