Building a loyalty portal for customers and reducing customer support queries

CarTrawler, a B2B partner to airlines, accommodation providers and online travel retailers, provides a world-leading travel technology platform to connect customers with tailored car rental. The company also operates its own brands, including Holiday Autos and Arguscarhire.com.

Following the success of the CMS Project we were asked to assist with implementing a new loyalty product, My Account. The existing system, running on Arguscarhire.com, was no longer fit for purpose for several reasons:

• Inflexible and difficult to support
• Legacy code base, that could not be used with multiple brands or partners
• Only available in English, but needed to support multiple languages
• Lack of FAQs, resulting in costly support calls

The vision of this project was to build a newloyalty portal for customers to log-in, make bookings more efficiently, manage their bookings and to earn loyalty rewards.

We decided to take a similar approach to the CMS Project, and start with an initial week’s discovery in order to understand the problem, carry out an initial user experience analysis, and determine the appropriate technical approach. The decision was made to ignore the existing platform, and instead to focus on the user requirements, in order to provide maximum user value and speed to market. After just four days, we had a backlog for the project and a working prototype.

Serverless architecture, a newcomer on the tech scene, was selected due to the speed at which the solution could be built and deployed, whilst providing assurances in security, stability and scalability. Serverless negates the need for a DevOps team, as providers such as Amazon Web Services provide guaranteed uptime, load balancing, scale and resilience. Any peaks in traffic are automatically accommodated by the service, and the provider can be changed with ease, without expense or downtime. In addition, Serverless significantly reduces the overheads associated with managing and maintaining a platform such as this.

The solution was a microservices architecture, built with a combination of suitable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions like Auth0, and bespoke services that used API Gateway, GraphQL, Lambda, DynamoDB, Kinesis and ElasticSearch. JavaScript libraries (including React and Redux) for the UI were also selected. Each of these options are open source or licence-free, significantly reducing the upfront build expense, and meaning the cost to change providers in the future is minimal. These may seem bold choices for a large business, but in reality, they are more efficient and hold less risk in terms of ongoing total cost of ownership.

With a cross-functional team, we were able to build a solution that requires minimal, if any, ongoing maintenance, with an ultra-low total cost of ownership, whilst providing web scale, performance and security.

Customers who have positive experiences are more likely to make repeat bookings, and the loyalty programme seeks to improve the customer experience further.

The new loyalty product, My Account, which is initially running on arguscarhire.com and Holiday Autos has helped:

• Reduce queries to customer support as customer can see and manage all their bookings in one place
• Increase the Repeat Booking Rate as customer receive exclusive discounts based on their booking volume
• Improve the brands’ Net Promoter Score and CSAT