Designing Solutions For Loyalty Programmes
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Jul 15, 2004 - New Straits Times, Computimes


For businesses, loyalty programmes are useful to help retain customers and gauge their satisfaction. While such tools can be developed internally, many businesses are outsourcing the task. Customer Loyalty Solutions Sdn. Bhd. (CLS) is a company which designs solutions to run loyalty programmes.

General manager Ooi Hooi Cheng said the company is able to provide a comprehensive suite of loyalty solutions to meet the budgets and requirements of clients.

She added that the company's loyalty solution is based on five core components.They are customer knowledge base management, call centre management, procurement and fulfillment, marketing and information technology (IT) support, and systems integration.

Customer knowledge base management is a multi-channel data warehouse management tool to optimise the customers' life-cycle through analytical reports on their profiting, marketing insights and measurement, and monitoring of responses.

Call centre management is an inbound and outbound call centre equipped with service staff. It has the technology capability to manage multi-client customers and provide better call customers.

Procurement and fulfillment manages the distribution of a company's rewards to customers. It takes care of activities like sourcing of merchandise, processing, order and redemption, handling and packaging, delivery and inventory control.

In terms of marketing support, CLS can customise services according to a client's needs and budget. The support services include strategising, conceptualising and marketing loyalty programmers based on customer profiling and segmentation, and the development of communication materials.

Under IT support and systems integration, CLS utilises expertise from its holding company, Advance Information Marketing Berhad (AIM). These include Advance Information Marketing System (AIMS), data warehouse/data mart for business intelligent solutions, online analytical processing (OLAP) reports for loyalty marketing activities, and data-mining solutions for loyalty marketing.AIM's chief technology officer Palani Selvam said the company supports open source software.

For example, AIMS' operating system for server runs on Linux while the application servers are based on open source.

"The database is still based on proprietary technology. But we are exploring the option of using an open source-based database," he said. "Our software is Web-enabled and Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition-compatible."

Some of CLS customers who are using the loyalty programmes and solutions include multinational companies such as L'Oreal Malaysia, American Home Assurance, Kao Malaysia and F&N Coca Cola.

"Some customers, for example banks, might outsource a particular component like procurement and fulfillment. Currently, we are handling a few call centre projects involving banks and multinational companies," Ooi said.

"By year-end, we are targeting four customers. Besides Malaysia and Singapore, we are spreading our wings to Thailand, Brunei, India and China."