A Deals App for New Customer Acquisition Channel
How Net Solutions helped a major bank in the Middle East develop a Deals app to increase their customer reach and contact.
Our client, IMC, was established in the Middle East in 2003. It has since grown fast, with a diverse portfolio of interests in consulting, loyalty management, research, digital marketing, social media and viral marketing.
One of IMC's clients, a major bank based in Dubai, was using printed pamphlets to inform customers about available deals and offers. This was not an effective method, as customers did not carry the pamphlets with them all the time. In addition, customers did not remember the deals and offers received through local and digital marketing, thereby missing out on lucrative offers available in the areas they were visiting, passing through or, indeed, living in.
The bank wanted IMC to provide them with a mobile app by which they would inform their customers of the deals or offers available to them wherever they might be.
One of the key requirements was to calculate how far a particular deal was from a user's current location. If the distance to the deal was calculated at the app level, the performance of the app would have been seriously compromised by the need to calculate this for multiple deals.
Notifications of locally available deals had to be sent to customers, wherever they were, dependent on their current location. This presented a considerable challenge to the project team who spent a lot of time coming up with a solution which worked for both Android and iPhone, as each operating system has different functionalities and different methods of operating their 'proximity' feature.
The App was designed to have the user's device to send its position co-ordinates to a back-end server. This SQL server then compared the longitude and latitude of the user's position to the locations of the various available deals, and then send back 'distance to the deal' data to the user's device, to provide the necessary information to the user.
With Android OS, the proximities feature allowed the distance to all deals to be calculated offline. In iOS, the number of deals or offers for which proximities could be set was limited; the team found a way for the app to compare available information with the database at the Back-End and trigger proximities to calculate the distances to the nearest deals.
The bank has a coupon-based app that works for both Android OS and iOS to offer its customers. Users get notifications about any local offers or deals available.
The bank's customers can also instigate location-based searches to find offers and deals for themselves.
Customers can categorise offers or deals presented through the app, in accordance with their own pre-set preferences.
The app also displays a 'best deals' section, where the most attractive deals are presented to users.
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