About
US’s leading distributor of quality pet food and animal supplies to pet stores nationwide.
Challenges & Goals
The company receives approximately 50,000 coupons/frequent-buyer-cards/vouchers in any given month from retailers across the US. The vendors are billed for processed coupons before retailers are given the credit back. The manual and arduous processes took a team of 15+ agents anywhere from 90 to 180 days to complete the lifecycle of coupon and loyalty rewards processing, causing payment delays and customer dissatisfaction. The company was looking to transform the resource-intensive customer loyalty program and improve the speed of credit to retailers.
Solution
- The Effectus team performed an in-depth assessment of every step in the loyalty program processes – from the collection of coupons at the retailer and receipt of them in the mail to entering them in the system, getting it processed and giving the due credit to each retailer.
- Our team remapped the process and introduced innovations to streamline the process and automate it.
- The first change was the move toward the digitization of all coupons, frequent buyer cards and loyalty vouchers through the identification of a 3rd party partner and the channeling of all items to be processed through them – freeing up internal resources from the manual and labor-intensive process.
- The second change was the outsourcing of all back-office processes of entering data and transactions associated with the items into the central application.
- The third change was the creation of a web application housing all the digitized items within the 3 incorporated environments –
- An internal portal that allows for validation of rules as well as the crediting and billing for items
- A retailers’ portal that allows them to view and understand their credits with the ability to look at the digital versions
- A vendor portal allows them to understand what they were being billed for and review these items
Results
The backlog of more than 400,000 documents was cleared in less than 90 days. Record tracking of new loyalty program document arrivals was put in place, providing clear visibility into the aging of rewards. There was a 95% reduction in the processing cycle – what used to take up to 180 days is now done in less than 10 days. Over $10 million worth of credit is processed through the portal on any given year. In addition to the reduction in cycle time, the client has realized savings of more than $1 million per year due to better utilization of employees, the standardization of business rules and the quality checks in place.
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Sam Billings
VP Operations, Gatorade
Areas Effectus Worked In
Process Re-engineering
Data Management and Warehousing
Digital Transformation
Change Management and Training
KPI and SLA Monitoring
Reporting and Analytics
Internal and External Portals
Back Office Process Management