The health and beauty retailer and pharmacy chain Boots is a household name with stores all over the world. Customers turn to Boots either in their need for beauty products and retail merchandise or as a trusted pharmacy offering prescription services and health advice.
The Boots Advantage Card is the company’s customer loyalty scheme and is the largest of its kind in Europe with over 18 million members.
challenge
Customer Advocacy and loyalty is a vital offering and the Boots Advantage Card has over 18 million members with specific points earning and redeeming needs along with memberships to essential clubs, for example new parents.
The Advantage Card scheme supported £4 billion of transactions at the till and needed to be able to scale up to supporting up to 100 transactions per second at peak periods. A loyalty scheme with membership as big as this requires the systems behind it to keeping it operating effectively and efficiently.
The scheme since its inception in 1997 needed a system modernisation and required an upgrade to become more real time and scalable for a digital business.
solution
Jay Parmar as the chief architect played a key role:
- Developing the solution architecture and the migration plan off legacy into new.
- Leading both the design and technical delivery team in the role of chief architect.
- Developing the blueprint and lead the supplier/vendor selection.
- Defining the solution functional and non-functional needs.
- Leading the design authority to ensure that technical issues, technical debt and costly unintended consequences were avoided.
- Ensuring that the integration to the new Boots.com (also lead by Jay) was seamless and enabled a great customer experience.
- Guaranteeing that the customer experience at the point of sale was not impeded (100 transactions per second).
- Maintaining strict compliance, data protection and security standards.
Key to the success was that it needed to be omni channel with 3,000 stores, 10,000 tills, ecommerce and partners all needing to be connected.
results
The solution won an industry award when it went live and endures today with the same framework and continues to support customer experience, advocacy and acts as one of the UKs leading and most popular loyalty schemes.
The project delivered a new loyalty platform with successful migration of customer data. Jay’s leadership saw the development of big data, analytics and insights platform to support customer loyalty; scaling unique customer offers and direct one-to-one offers significantly.