Client Situation
Our client is a recognized grocery retail leader in the UAE. The business works primarily in a retail business model and has also launched a new brand of retail stores with plans of expansion across the UAE. With its 30+ existing and 13 new stores, the group engaged Cedar to assist in reviewing its existing Loyalty Program design and a way forward roadmap to realign with group business objectives.
Cedar’s Approach
In this program, Cedar assisted the client with a market overview and internal assessment. Post this evaluation, Cedar designed way-forward recommendations for the retail loyalty program.
- Market & Competitive Assessment: Cedar conducted a thorough market assessment to understand different loyalty models in the retail landscape, globally and in the UAE. The competitive landscape was also evaluated with leading retailers in the UAE and their loyalty offerings and benefits. Cedar also researched industry trends - Tiers, collaboration, points conversion, points validity, and merchant networks to identify local and international benchmarks.
- Internal Assessment: Cedar reviewed the current loyalty program and its performance and performed internal capabilities assessment through financial and operating data evaluation. This step was followed by identifying critical challenges in technology and processes through primary meetings with key internal stakeholders. Cedar applied these findings to understand the existing points conversion model and its financial implications.
- Way-Forward Recommendations: Cedar developed a tiered group-wide Loyalty Program design with Loyalty upgrade and downgrade rules. The team also shared recommendations across financial, customer, process organization, and technology objectives:
- Financial: Financial Model for 3-year strategy, Tiered point conversion, cost implication, and revenue estimation across segments
- Customer & Products: Loyalty revenue split, tiers, tier upgrade/downgrade rules & redemption avenues
- Process: Data Collection - analytics, vendor selection, marketing and visibility initiatives
- Organization & Technology: Organization structure and benchmarking of the technology employed with best market practices, alternate solutions/module upgrades to the existing solution
Outcome
The program resulted in a detailed group-wide Retail Loyalty strategy design and recommendations for the organization. These recommendations included:
- A detailed and accurate representation of both global and regional loyalty programs
- Set criteria and loyalty rules across different stages of loyalty- onboarding till redemption
- A shift to a tiered loyalty program for differentiated offerings by demonstrating the benefits and importance of this shift
- High-level partner selection criteria and evaluation for existing and potential solution vendors
- Conservative and aggressive financial projections reflecting incremental revenue and costs on a 3-year basis split across Segments/Tiers
- Marketing and visibility initiatives for the program
- A redefined organization structure with clearly outlined roles and responsibilities for select positions
Cedar shared a proposal with a set of 8-10 immediate activities post design finalization with high level implementation plan for next 12-16 months.