Client Overview

The customer is one of the major Trans-European High speed rail services based in London. It has been hailed as having set new standards in international rail travel and has won acclaims several times over, recognizing its high standards.

The rail service currently operates a fleet of 27 trains between three major countries in Europe. It continues to outperform the airlines operating on its routes by a considerable share and retains over 70% of the air/rail market. Since inception, they have carried over 130 million passengers. An advantage held by this rail service is the convenience and speed of the service: with shorter check-in times than at most airports and hence quicker boarding and less queueing and high punctuality. This enables them to take lesser time to travel between central London and central Paris by high-speed rail than it does by air.

The Context

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. This would not only enable them to use a single platform to run both their loyalty programs but also enable them to introduce and scale the loyalty operations without incurring high operational cost.

• Replace in-house legacy systems with a new generation loyalty management solution that is easier to maintain and compatible to changes
• Manage two disparate loyalty program propositions under a single roof.
• Superior sustainability and scalability in line with the brand's planned business expansion
• Seamlessly integrate with the new distribution platform and website, thus becoming the critical component of a GBP 25 million business transformation.
• Re-engineer contact center processes to improve agent productivity and enhance user experience

Customer Challenges

A big challenge that the customer faced was to streamline processes to make them more efficient and subsequently reduce efforts required. They also looked at integrating into front-end systems like the website and similar channels in order to be seamless and this had to be carried out with minimal impact on the operations.

Another important challenge was the migration of incomplete and redundant data in order to clean and enrich the existing data. Two separate loyalty programs running on two different platforms resulted in escalated operational costs.

• Migrate incomplete and redundant data from multiple in-house loyalty systems to iLoyal
• Device an intermediate mechanism to integrate iLoyal to existing website with minimal impact
• Redesign contact center processes with minimal impact to agents and users alike
• Ensure compliance to challenging project schedule so as to not impact subsequent phases involving multiple vendors

The Solution

IBS proposed its loyalty management solution iLoyal to tackle all challenges that the customer had been dealing with. IBS' proven delivery standards and extensive experience in the travel and transportation domain convinced the customer that it had found its perfect partner.

iLoyal's multi-program capability allowed the customer to host and run both their programs in a single platform. In addition, the end-to-end interaction management module of iLoyal helped the customer redesign its contact centre processes with ease thereby bringing improved efficiency. iLoyal also enabled the customer to integrate with all the existing channels plus the capability to extend it to other channels in future. Functional and technical experts carried out workshops at the customer location to understand the various aspects of the existing system process and came up with the following solutions:

• To mitigate the risk arising from low quality loyalty data, multiple cycles of data migration were carried out and appropriate validation check points inserted during final migration to ensure data quality.
• A new interface layer was custom developed to act as an adapter between the website and iLoyal to ensure seamless integration.
• A complete end to end process re-definition was carried out by the domain consultant and functional analyst after separate workshops at the call center. This new process was elicited to the agents through training sessions organized by the functional team.

iLoyal – Key Features

• Membership management tool for customer profiling
• Self-service environment for members and partners
• Campaign management, Reports and Analytics for CRM operations
• Integrated communication modules like e-mail, SMS, fax, FTP, messaging (MQ), web services
• Rules Engine provides an easy way of adopting new business/industry drivers into your existing FFP
• Readymade interfaces make customization easy
• Modular architecture ensures easy integration

Key Results

Through this successful implementation, IBS has cemented iLoyal's position as the most complete loyalty management solution, capable of operating in multiple domains outside of aviation.

• In iLoyal, the rail service now has a single, end to end loyalty management solution capable of managing the customer's two loyalty programs
• iLoyal's flexibility and ease of use allows business users to easily perform day to day management of loyalty programs, something that was impossible with the previous systems
• The robustness of the service center portal in iLoyal, along with the re-engineered process has allowed the call center to handle calls more efficiently, thus increasing productivity and enhancing customer service
• Customer plans to use out-of-the-box functional capabilities of iLoyal to handle various subsidiary actions like partner billing, campaign management, communications etc., which are currently carried outside the loyalty system. This would, in time, make iLoyal a core customer management platform for the customer that brings all subsidiary functions under a single solution.