Loyalty program Saint-Gobain MULTI CLUB

ISOVER, one of the divisions of the French concern Saint-Gobain and number one on the Czech market in the field of thermal, sound and fire insulation, approached us with a request to create a loyalty program that could be fully administered by them and could be deployed for one or more divisions according to needs.

Original situation: 

Limited functionality of the previous loyalty program, complex administration and its ownership by an external supplier. ISOVER in the Czech Republic conducts sales through distributor, at the same time, however, it wants to be in direct contact with its end customers - companies that purchase material from distributors. A loyalty program was used for this, in the framework of which companies collected points for which they could receive various types of rewards, from material to educational. However, the original loyalty program was operated by an external supplier and its use was limited - with complex adjustment and limited reward options. ISOVER thus wanted to develop a loyalty program that it would fully own and which would enable simple administration. 

Requirements:

Client-owned, modern, flexible loyalty program with the possibility of deployment in various divisions. Implementation in the form of a web client-server application with a central database server. 

• Ownership of the system by the client.
  
• Scalability – simple onboarding of another divisions or termination of the participation of current ones.
• The possibility to register the implementation company (i.e. clients customer) under one or more divisions and work with them independently.
• Multi-level registration approval process including escalations.
• Possibility to assign individually defined access rights to representatives of implementation companies according to the type of cooperation.
• Integration with Zoho CRM used by the client and data synchronization.
• Automatically updated catalog of Isover products.
• Connection to distributors' business systems and enabling automatic data upload using data sentences.
• Link to selected categories of the reward supplier's e-shop (alza.cz).
• Management of customer orders and reward-point accounts by the administrator without the intervention of developers.
• Users from the ranks of representatives of implementation companies can see the status of their account in the system and can directly choose a reward.
• Built-in control mechanisms.
• A modern design that is in line with the client's brand communication (and is based on the design delivered by the client's graphic studio), including full responsiveness. 

Solution: 

Custom development of ASP.NET Core web application. 

Unlike commonly available licensed solutions, the client gets full ownership over the system and the ability to adapt it to their needs (e.g. individual access to companies or simple scaling) and campaigns. The Front End (FE) module  handles all user interactions as a standalone web application. The application is built on modern technologies - ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core is used to access the MS SQL DB, data validation is implemented using Fluent Validation. The system is laid out into tables that are displayed in a grid using DataTables. Data import implemented using XML, and then processed by Webservices. The API validates the necessary data (such as the distributor's ID number) from the Zoho CRM system used by the client.

Thanks to the automatic acquisition of sales data from partners using the API, the administrator saves the time originally required for manual data processing. Connecting directly to the e-shop of the wholesale supplier of rewards reduces purchase prices and thus the overall cost of the partner program. 

Technology stack: 

Application server: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET Boilerplate Web Application Framework, Entity Framework Core, AutoMapper, Fluent Validation

DB Server: MS SQL Server

Front-end: HTML5, SASS, jQuery, Bootstrap, DataTables, Webpack, npm