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Maravedi loyalty programme developed in record time
Maravedi is a consumer finance company focused on providing a full spectrum of financial services aimed at the mass middle market in South Africa. JD Group holds a majority shareholding in Maravedi and Thebe Investment Corporation owns the balance. Maravedi’s strategic intent is to provide the consumer with a range of affordable financial services, products and solutions including personal loans, bank accounts and funeral plans. The company also acts as the financial administrator of JD Group retail outlets; Incredible Connection and Hi-Fi Corporation.
THE SITUATION
Maravedi sought to initiate a loyalty programme with
its customers as part of its marketing efforts with the ultimate goal of
improving customer relationships. Intervate, its technology partner,
was in the midst of developing a new Business Intelligence (BI) solution
and, by leveraging off this, it was able to develop the additional
Maravedi Value Programme (MVP) and meet the extremely tight deadline.
“We come from a background where our applications had not evolved sufficientlywhich led to a severe lack of BI knowledge, as well as a lack of coordination between financial and sales data sources. So our first consideration was to solve these difficulties,” said Leoni Groenewald, CIO, Maravedi. “This was underway when our marketing director saw an opportunity to enhance our marketing plans which would benefit from a loyalty scheme.”
THE SOLUTION
Intervate’s initial engagement with Maravedi was to deploy a comprehensive data warehouse to store financial and customer data. “We started to amalgamate Maravedi’s financial and sales data from a variety of sources to construct a system whereby all the data would be consolidated in a complete data warehouse,” Ian Gatley, BI Competency Manager, Intervate. “As phase one of the project neared completion, a new business requirement emerged for a loyalty programme. Initially, Maravedi requested a completely separate application which would be undertaken as an independent project. Intervate suggested piggybacking off the existing data warehouse implementation to meet the marketing requirement.
The loyalty programme necessitated a solution be built with multiple touch points whereby call centre staff and third parties could access, view and update customer details through a SharePoint based front end solution. The advanced reporting and analytics provided by the loyalty programme would enable the marketing department to track the influence of the Maravedi Value Programme on customer behaviour. “The installation of additional hardware was not necessary, nor was there much need for extensive development on the solution. The projected completion period was originally three months, yet Intervate met the deadline with time to spare because most of the groundwork had been completed whilst building the data warehouse.”
The key areas of the solution included:
• A SharePoint front end application used by the call centre to search for customers and update their preferences
• The ability to send personalised SMSs to Maravedi’s customers
• The ability to provide reports and analytical data to the marketing department to show what impact the loyalty programme was having on customer behaviour.
For the MVP, the marketing department needed to analyse clients’ payment patterns and offer an incentive whereby benefits would be given to those whose payments were in order. Using the information accessed through the data warehouse, Maravedi would be able to determine which customers met the criteria to belong to the MVP programme on a monthly basis. This would be achieved by analysing the financial information and looking at the customer’s credit balance. The details of these customers would then be sent to a third party vendor to analyse.
BUSINESS BENIFITS
The key business driver that promoted the implementation of the new solution was a desire to understand and influence the behaviour of Maravedi’s customer base, in turn reducing the bad debt ratio for the company. The BI component of the solution gives the company a view of customers who are up-to-date with their repayments and those who are falling behind. The advanced analytics of the loyalty programme allows Maravedi to target its marketing campaigns directly.
“From my point of view, the major benefit of the new system is that Intervate not only came to the party with a successful solution for the marketing department, but developed the entire process within a limited timeframe and presented additional benefits that exceeded the original brief,” said Groenewald. “The system has been designed to be as flexible as possible to allow for the inclusion of other systems at a later stage, if necessary. “We now have a holistic view of customer requirements which we did not have before we were never able to amalgamate reports from different sources beforehand but with the data warehouse in place, we can obtain an complete view of every customer,” Groenewald concluded.
The speed with which Intervate completed the loyalty programme has been particularly beneficial to Maravedi and its customers.