Landmark Group Scales up the Loyalty Program

"To improve the footfall at our stores, we needed a robust loyalty program. We wanted to scale up the existing loyalty program across the Landmark Group of companies in India and make it a group loyalty program," says Sudesh Agarwal, VP-IT, Landmark Group. "A customer should be able to earn loyalty points anywhere and burn it anywhere across the group's companies."

The problem with extending Lifestyle's loyalty program was the way the group was structured. Different group companies had their own point-of-sale systems. One idea was to throw manpower at the problem "But collecting CRM data on a daily basis from locations that did not have dedicated IT personnel was big challenge," says Agarwal.

Another idea was to take a Web approach. "Initially, the process was designed around a Web-based module which would connect to a POS database and transfer data to a central Oracle database. But because some group companies had POS systems with other databases, this proved difficult. After some deliberation, the solution that we came up was this: a small application on each POS would generate a text file containing sales data and this text file would be uploaded through a Web program to a central server," says Agarwal.

At the store end, there was a question over how loyalty card data would be collected. Some stores had magnetic strip readers on which loyalty cards can be swiped, but others didn't. And manually punching in card numbers was prone to error. "So group loyalty program cards were issued with barcodes since scanners were already available at all outlets," says Agarwal.

The Rs 20-lakh project, which got underway in November 2008, used a Java/Oracle Platform and was launched in March 2009. Despite the challenges, it has been well received and expects to achieve ROI soon.

The Person Behind It

Sudesh Agarwal, VP-IT

Landmark Group

"A customer should be able to earn loyalty points anywhere and burn it anywhere across the group’s companies."