Elly Yates-Roberts |
Part of SIGNA Retail Group, Kika/Leiner is an Austrian furniture retailer with more than 50 stores. It offers high-quality, well-known brands at reasonable prices with numerous extra services, including express delivery within 48 hours.
Kika/Leiner uses a mix of traditional and online channels to promote its products and to foster loyalty among its customer base. Promotions – typically delivered in the form of paper or digital coupons – are communicated using radio, TV commercials and in-store advertisements, and are distributed via printed media or mailings. These coupons can be redeemed in-store or online, enabling the company to easily introduce new products to its customers and encourage individuals to try out other brands and services. The firm has seen great success in offering discounts which have helped it incentivise customers to buy more, or make a purchase in the moment, rather than holding back and purchasing at a later date.
The brand serves around five million customers per year and offers a wide range of furniture brands and products. As such, its marketing team has to define, create, distribute and manage the life cycle of several hundreds of promotions each month. Due to past acquisitions that resulted in a merger of different technology stacks, the marketing staff also need to create promotions in three different and decentralised campaign systems, each with their own basket calculation engine. This was a very time-consuming and error-prone process and made it difficult to guarantee consistency in promotions across all channels and customer touchpoints. Since the data was managed and stored in three separate systems, the campaign results – which included the number of coupons redeemed and actual spend per campaign – were difficult to analyse.
In order to simplify the process of creating and managing multichannel promotions and coupons, Kika/Leiner decided to expand its existing partnership with Diebold Nixdorf – which had primarily focused on point-of-sale (POS) solutions – to cover loyalty management too. Kika/Leiner implemented Diebold Nixdorf’s retail loyalty platform Vynamic Engage as a one-stop solution to replace the three existing campaign systems.
Vynamic Engage is a cloud-native, customer engagement platform that serves both online and offline channels. It comprises three modules: one for loyalty management, one for couponing and vouchers, and one for advanced promotions. Each module can be used as a stand alone, or can be integrated with a retailer’s existing POS and enterprise resource planning systems via documented application programming interfaces (APIs). Given the business challenges and technology infrastructure already in place, Kika/Leiner was most interested in the advanced promotions module.
For Kika/Leiner, one of the key selling points of Vynamic Engage was that it is centrally hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Marketers can create advanced, multichannel promotions and easily deploy these onto all customer touchpoints in real time. As such, the user can guarantee consistency across channels and touchpoints and more flexibly add or update promotions.
By deploying the solution, the firm was able to reduce the workload associated with managing its multiple loyalty campaign systems for marketing staff. They are now able to spend more time on other marketing activities to further promote the Kika/Leiner brand. Implementing Vynamic Engage has also provided the marketing team with a unified view of all campaigns across all channels, allowing them to better understand spend and results per promotion, and optimise future campaigns.
Kika/Leiner was also able to leverage Vynamic Engage’s advanced promotions module. The module features a highly robust promotion calculation engine that is capable of handling high transaction volumes; ideal for Kika/Leiner given its more than five million customer transactions each year. The platform can also run in offline mode, enabling in-store staff to continue to apply discounts and promotions even if there is poor network connectivity in the store.
The entire implementation and roll-out of the project took less than six months, as the cloud software did not require any on-premises installations. Vynamic Engage now gives Kika/Leiner a jumping board for future customer loyalty initiatives, such as introducing a multichannel gift card.
Since Vynamic Engage is fully cloud-native, incorporates the latest cloud standards and is built using an API-first design, it offers many opportunities for growth, no matter which software solutions are already installed. In addition, Vynamic Engage gives Kika/Leiner more control and better predictability over future expenses since it is hosted as a service in the cloud by Diebold Nixdorf with a monthly subscription fee.
"Diebold Nixdorf’s Vynamic Engage helped us achieve our strategy of creating a future-proof loyalty platform for flexible campaign management,” said Gaby Schwarz, chief information officer at Kika/Leiner. “The cloud-based solution has improved efficiencies and reduced complexities for us when integrating new promotions, so we finally have a single source of truth.”
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.