UTU is the world’s first borderless digital solution for tax-free shopping around the world. UTU is about connecting shops with shoppers and promoting a seamless retail experience and 100% tax refunds to maximize value for all stakeholders. The company’s vision lies in removing the pain of the refunding process, promoting freedom & choice, and transforming the industry into a user-centric model.
One of UTU’s core business is Cross Border Rewards ~ UTU Rewards – a seamless platform delivered through a mobile app to grant users rewards instantaneously as they shop. UTU leverages spending patterns and merchant categories to provide relevant promotions to users.
"The platform has helped us streamline the processes involved in running campaigns and also saved developers time and involvement in the step-by-step definition and setup.”
Key challenges
- A need for a promotion engine to power the UTU Rewards app.
- The existing technology stack that the new promotion engine has to integrate with.
- Constant changes to the promotions because of new partners joining or the current partners changing their requirements.
“We are still exploring full discount coupon features provided by Voucherify, and our initial assessment indicates that Voucherify coupon/voucher capabilities offer a lot of flexibility that can be leveraged.”
UTU’s Rewards app needed a backend logic behind offered rewards and promotions. UTU had an existing, developed in-house promotion engine that could handle basic loyalty points assignments, but it lacked multiple features. Expanding the current in-house promotion engine that would be scalable and agile enough to address merchant partners’ requirements was assessed to be too time-consuming and expensive.
They have decided to go for an out-of-the-box promotion engine. UTU needed a solution that could work with their existing points platform to deliver targeted offers and redemption mechanics for discounts and loyalty points. The solution needed to be user-friendly – the objective was to empower their sales team to manage the merchant partners’ campaigns end-to-end. They also needed flexibility, as the types of campaigns depend on the partners’ requirements, and these may change quickly, especially as they are adding new partners to their network.
Voucherify was shortlisted in the research conducted by UTU’s VP, Insights & Automation. It had the required features and, thanks to API-first build, could quickly adapt to the existing technology stack and allow for quick changes to the promotions.
The integration with Voucherify took two weeks for the initial set-up and six weeks in total until the launch of the first campaign. The user-friendly UI enabled UTU’s campaign operators to manage campaigns without the need to involve developers. The promotions launched by UTU vary per merchant partner’s promotion mechanics. The majority of promotions are either loyalty programs (point-based) or discount coupons. The promotions are usually very narrowly targeted and incentivize concrete customer actions as the partner merchants design them.
Solution
“When it comes to results reached with Voucherify, unfortunately in 2020 Covid-19 impacted the customer spend and usual behavior hence the results are not as expected. However, we are positive that we will benefit immensely from Voucherify once travel and shopping resume to normal.”
Here are some examples of promotions UTU launched using Voucherify:
- Discount vouchers for referrals.
- Additional discounts for the first 30 loyalty program members who convert accumulated loyalty points to cash.
- Prizes for successful loyalty points conversions, for example, cinema tickets or Starbucks gift cards.
- Loyalty program in which customers can get UTU points for: spending a certain amount of money on partner services (each partner has their own earning rule in the loyalty program and the amount of points/$ spent may vary), having a particular frequency of purchasing partner’s products or services (for example, granting 300 UTU points for at least five restaurant transactions within 30 days), paying with a specific method of payment or converting loyalty points from other providers (Thanachart).
They are planning to launch more advanced discount coupon campaigns in the future.
