Etisalat Smiles
Tokenization of Loyalty Points
Customer Loyalty In The Digital Age
Challenges with Loyalty Programs
- Clunky Process of voucher redemption
- Limited product and merchant portfolio for redemption
- Inefficient customer experience
On the other hand Loyalty Program Providers face a host of challenges when expanding their loyalty programs to a wider network of merchants – or when they aim to collaborate with other loyalty point providers to increase customer spread and redemption choices.
Some key operational challenges include:
- Cumbersome merchant onboarding
- Huge Reconciliation & settlements overheads
- Limited merchant and product visibility on catalogs
- Fragmented & high Investments in IT Solutions & Infrastructure to support the ecosystem
Etisalat Smiles - Leveraging Fidelity to manage loyalty program
Etisalat with their 10 million plus subscribers and their all-encompassing Loyalty Program “Smiles” has broken through this barrier by launching the region’s first blockchain enabled Loyalty Programs exchange platform in collaboration iTOO-Avanza.
This is Etisalat’s first step towards truly digitizing and tokenizing Loyalty Points. As part of the same initiative Etisalat also plans to convert Smiles into one of the biggest market places in UAE, enabling Smiles customers to buy in-app products from hundreds of Etisalat partner merchants – instead of just being able to redeem loyalty points at the outlets.
Merchants will be able to push their items and SKUs to the Smiles app, and consumers will be able to purchase these products from their loyalty points seamlessly.
Built on Hyperledger Fabric, and driven through iTOO-Avanza‘s Blockchain Orchestration and Governance platform – Cipher, the platform is deployed on MS Azure.