Comarch Loyalty Marketing Platform for Auchan Retail

About the Auchan Diamond Customer Project

Auchan is a French multinational retail group headquartered in Croix, France. Founded in 1961, the company now operates in 12 countries, has a €32,9 billion of consolidated revenue excluding taxes, and hires 160,407 employees. Auchan’s mission is to meet the demands of today’s purchase- and health-conscious omnichannel consumers, with the goal and desire to bring change to their lives.

That’s why, in 2017, Auchan Retail made the decision to put the customer experience at the heart of its development. The project, set to cover 14 countries, was named the ‘Diamond Customer.’ To start it up, Auchan needed a reliable and global provider of loyalty software. That’s why the group began cooperation with Comarch and decided to rely on its Loyalty Marketing Platform for special offer engine activation and loyalty management services.

History of Diamond Customer

The Diamond Customer, the very heart of Auchan’s transformation, is an IT-and-human-based project. Its goal is to make the brand become customer-centric, with the desire to serve customers better as well as to offer them more unique, personalized, and connected (both digitally and physically) relationships. The Diamond Customer project is based on four
building blocks:

• Customer Base, which is the only place where all customer information is stored.
• Customer Care, which aims to improve interactions between customers and the brand.
• Customer Activation, the objective of which is to offer a personalized customer experience through the implementation of content and personalized marketing campaigns in line with customer tastes and expectations.
• Customer Benefit, the purpose of which is to reward customer loyalty and support customer engagement. This part is supported by Comarch’s Loyalty Marketing Platform.

The main challenge of the Diamond Customer project is to make our customers aware of the privileged relationship they can have with Auchan, as well as to boost their satisfaction. This includes a lot of personalization – regardless of the point of sale – and implementation of diversified mechanisms adapted to the customer’s affinities."

Ambition to Provide All Countries With the Same Tool

Initiated in 2016, the Diamond Customer project aims to provide countries with a common base so that all could benefit from advanced solutions to develop and offer loyalty programs regardless of their technical resources. The challenge for Auchan, relying on a Core Model, is to make “a leap forward” in countries that are not equipped while gaining efficiency and controlling costs.

Transversal Project Around a Core Model

In order to carry out this ambitious project, Auchan has decided to rely on a Core Model that can be deployed in different countries, regardless of the store format (hypermarkets, supermarkets, convenience stores, e-commerce). The Core Model induces a set of best practices, special offer libraries, and standardized integration capabilities to enable rapid deployment.

The implementation of this Core Model was carried out in several stages. The first one – structuring – included establishing a set of common business processes between the countries. This was followed by the construction of the Core Model and industrialization, which included the standard deployment process, standardized maintenance, and an evaluation before deployment.

Discover the Loyalty Marketing Platform

Between the Physical and Digital Dimensions of Customer Experience

A modern customer is a connected customer. Their relationship with a brand takes place in both the digital and physical spheres. That’s why Auchan had to evolve its animation tools and services, including the development of communities serving the brand, to best respond to its clients’ lifestyles and consumption habits.

Loyalty programs are a great way to achieve that, as they pose the opportunity to strengthen knowledge about customers, thus making it possible to optimize the level of personalization in Auchan’s communication channels. Loyalty can also be used as a means to support a brand image, as programs can reward customers for buying local products or donating to charitable causes. That’s how the brand can feed customer satisfaction, retention, and engagement while simultaneously recruiting new consumers.

Connecting Transactional and Relational Loyalty

To better reward the most loyal customers, Auchan’s loyalty program is intended to be, first and foremost, statutory. It also includes a service and experiential counterpart (with invitations to dedicated events such as tasting workshops, VIP days, exclusive pre-sales, etc.).

With its key focus on personalization, the initiative offers a wide range of additional solutions, including the welcome pack, which allows customers to benefit from a set of discounts for their registration to the program, and a system of communication based on a customer’s preference, so that the client can only receive offers that correspond with their desires. Different mechanisms around commercial animation are also put in place to respond to the challenges of loyalty, recruitment, and even reactivation.

Strong Challenges in Terms of Volume and Processing Time

Volumetric management is one of the keys to success at Auchan, as we observe 1.5 million transactions/day for all activated countries with a processing time of < 200 ms.