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Customer loyalty card software for a cafe franchise

Custom loyalty solution for a cafe franchise

For this project, the customer requested dedicated .NET development team experienced in OCR and images recognition to create customer loyalty software which can process QR based loyalty cards with webcams without using any specific hardware. The required custom solution was needed to produce and process huge numbers of the loyalty cards in cafes across all the country and handle the operations related to accumulated bonuses and discounts, such as calculations, automatic discounts, and processing of the payments with bonuses.

Project technology stack

.NET, C#

Timeframe and workload

Over 10 Months and 2 Developers

Challenge

Our team has been asked to prototype and launch an easy-to-use solution for non-technical users that will be capable of the making new loyalty cards alongside with quick, reliable scanning and tracking of the acquired and spend bonuses. The final customer loyalty software also had to be integrated with existing POS software to allow staff to apply the discounts using loyalty bonuses.

Existek needed to achieve high stability of the customer loyalty software since it has a big workload and is used in many cafes across all the country.
Customer planned to avoid involvement of the costly and unreliable hardware solutions like barcode scanners.
Achieve 100% accuracy of the QR codes and images recognition with webcams
Integrate custom Customer Loyalty Card Software with POS system to let customers pay the bills with accrued bonuses

Solution

As the first step, we have developed a specification document where we have listed all the available hardware which will be used, limitations, expectations for speed and flexibility of the final solution.The final customer loyalty software was built with a complex of the image recognition and processing libraries for video and ASP .NET. Below is the list of specifications and features we’ve implemented upon customer’s request to help him to achieve his business objectives.

Loyalty software had very little downtime and was able to process a huge number of loyalty cards with zero failure rate.
Final loyalty card software worked without any expensive industry-specific hardware solutions.
Processing and recognition of the QR codes and images in the real-time
Customers database with the live data about acquired bonuses.
Functionality that allowed cafe employees to accrue bonuses to the customer’s card separately for each order
Automatic calculation of the discount and the percentage of bonus accruals
Option to pay a bill partially or completely by the bonuses from loyalty card

Impact

The cafe franchise highly appreciated the customer loyalty software we have build for them. The final solution had almost zero downtime and processed large amounts of the data which is usually going in hand with the customer loyalty programs. Visitors have found it handy. Same can be said about the staff of the cafes.

Guests were highly engaged by the customer loyalty card program; they found it fun and easy according to the later surveys held by the managers of the cafes and restaurants. The cafes franchise management team and the owner loved to use our custom build solutions as it was very reliable, never crashed or return any errors, and could be trusted in any circumstances. This result was achieved without the involvement of the expensive hardware or contract lock-ins, what they considered as a huge advantage.

The end product was user-friendly, highly reliable and didn’t need constant technical support.