A Valuable Interview With Comarch's Loyalty Experts

The constantly changing customer loyalty and IT market raises numerous issues. Customer journey tracking, targeted rewards, unintrusive massages, beacons, location-based services are only some of the challenges. Comarch’s customer portfolio includes one of the most powerful brands in  the industry such as Brussels Airlines, Etihad Airways Group, Dubai Airports, as well as JetBlue Airways, Iberia, Zurich Airport, Scandinavian Airlines, Turkish Airlines and Azul Airways,  therefore our extensive experience makes our specialists a priceless source of loyalty knowledge. We are proud to present an interview with Piotr Kozłowski and Arkadiusz Młyniec who discuss the above-mentioned problems and share their professional insights.

What are Comarch’s key services, and how has it developed its offering within the airport industry?

We are proud to deliver our solutions to large enterprises, including a quarter of Forbes’ top 100 World’s Biggest Public Companies. Our offices are located in over 70 cities all over the world and our team counts more than 5000 specialists. Over the past eight years, we have significantly strengthened our position in the airport and airline industry by delivering loyalty management platforms, business intelligence solutions, smart-city solutions, gamification and engagement platforms, and CRM and loyalty consulting services.

Comarch is now reinforcing our airport expertise with Smart Airport solution targeted at airports of all sizes and passenger types. The below functionalities available from a single platform enabled with location-based-services help airports turn fliers into buyers:

• Single customer view  with rich profile data
• Customer journey tracking
• Segmentation and targeting for contextualised, real-time communication
• Location based marketing (beacons and sensors)
• ROI-oriented loyalty program
• Multipartner solutions
• Transactional and behavioural customer data analysis
• Airport Information & services
• Flight management and updates

Engaging customers on a one-to-one, personalised basis is central to a successful loyalty management programme. How is this achieved in the Heathrow example?

The personalization of modern loyalty programs is primarily driven by targeted communication, powered by data collected from the touch points with members. The program’s communication and ‘dedicated offers’ generation is based firmly upon the relevance principle, so that members receive meaningful information that can enhance their shopping experience at the airport without intruding.

Airports are large centres of activity, with many different stakeholders and retail offerings, how do you design a system which allows all these elements to feed into an accessible platform for the customer?

One of the key selling points of Comarch’s platform is a set of interfaces and touch points that can be used by multiple airport tenants and partners. Thanks to this, businesses can easily deliver transaction data feeds to be processed by the loyalty platform. For that purpose, Comarch delivers flexible API with real-time services, translatable file formats, and a dedicated app for mobile devices.

And from the client side, how are companies like Heathrow able to manage the programme, gain insight into customers, and grow engagement, using Comarch’s system?

Our solution is equipped with a strong reporting and analytical platform that provides full insight into the performance of the program at a global level, as well as at a particular merchant’s level. The personalization of modern loyalty programs is primarily driven by targeted communication, powered by data collected from the touch points with members. The program’s communication and ‘dedicated offers’ generation is based firmly upon the relevance principle, so that members receive meaningful information that can enhance their shopping experience at the airport without intruding.

How do you work with Heathrow (and with all your clients) to meet their specific needs  and ensure the programme is and continues to be a success? To what extent can you tailor your products?

For several years, a unique selling point has been our ability to customize software to fit to the very specific needs of our customers. Developing and extending this capability remains a core focus for our ongoing research and development work. So that today, majority of specific customer`s requirements can be met due to proper configuration of the platform, what brings significant synergies to our entire customer base.

Please could you outline the Comarch Loyalty Management Mobile Application and Comarch Beacon, and how these feeds into the passenger experience?

The Comarch Loyalty Management (CLM) mobile app, together with our new micro-location technology Comarch Beacon, opens up new opportunities for personalized communication with loyalty-program members. Using the Beacon signal, the CLM app estimates where the customer is located and prompts real-time messages related to nearby products or checkpoints on his or her smartphone. While creating these messages, we can draw upon the customer’s loyalty status and purchasing decisions as accumulated in the ‘Comarch Loyalty Management’ platform to highlight benefits and products relevant to a member at a particular time, in a very specific location.