Beerpoint
For whom might it be interesting?
For all types of b2b business who have a program or plastic cards. Practice shows that the application is often less expensive than reissuing member cards. Plus, it is a self-sustaining continuously updated customer base: up-to-date telephone number, date of birth, full name.
Whose request it was?
The owner of the Beerpoint chain having almost 100 shops. Can you imagine the size of the customer database, goods, stock? He wanted to digitalise it all to make things easier for himself and his customers.
What was the request?
A mobile application for regular customers allowing them to review their bonus card statistics and learn, for example, whether their favourite beer is available in the nearest shop and then build a route there.
Noteworthy, the customer's program is very sophisticated. It is possible to accumulate points through cash back and then spend them later or use a fixed discount. Also each 15th litre of beer is free with the bonus card and they can be accumulated up to 5 litres.
All these require continuous monitoring of purchases and accruals/withdrawals.
Who made it?
Our mobile lead Maria Sidorevich was in charge of the front end. Back end: Ilya Zavilensky. Appearance of the application was made by an outsource designer.
How long did it take?
Prototyping and design took 1.5 months. Development took another 2 months. And then it took 3 weeks to fine tune the application with actual data and scenarios. That is, it took us a little over 4 months to develop the application. And the customer enjoyed working with us so much that he ordered an internal application for the company's employees as well.
Why is it cool for the user?
No to plastics, fat wallets and missed discounts. Yes to a handy application and a discount card always at hand, as well as the possibility to track that free 15th litre. And certainly, to save time on driving between the shops looking for one's favourite beer. One can also monitor the stock online regardless whether one's at home or visiting.
Why is it cool for the customer?
The application allows to forget about the need to check the level of bonuses on the card, when were they accrued and withdrawn, etc. Everything is clearly visualised and thought through in terms of UX/UI.
It gives an additional marketing tool: it has promotions, news, push notifications.
A clear and smooth connection is established allowing to control the quality of products and the employees' work and improve the customer's loyalty. it is possible to mitigate any negative feelings from the customers by offering some free litres of beer.
Why do we love this product?
The catalogue displayed to the customers is updated every 15 minutes to show products available in shops. It seems like nothing extraordinary. But the beer is on tap, not bottled. That is, using maths and no magic we see how many litres are there left in kegs at each sales point and we show the data in real time.
We used React Native for the first time to allow adding the card to Apple Wallet. We made it Open Source, by the way.
We implemented a complex integration with 1C. Customers can see all their cards received offline, select the necessary one and then use it via their phones.
Plus, as soon as the purchase comes through, 1C sends us an order and we check whether an application has such a customer and then either keep the order or skip it. If we save it, we send a push notification with the order information immediately to the regular customer. Thus we can process up to 100 orders per minute. Respectively, customers can always look up what and when they bought, the goods, prices, discounts, savings.
We realised the possibility to leave 360 reviews after each purchase: about the shop, the goods, employees. It requires minor writing, just pressing icons and rating. It allows the administration to control the quality of products and the level of customer service.
In addition to all the shops being shown on the map with easy route building we also added filters by working hours.
Which technologies were used?
Front-end: React Native is our main front end stack
Back-end:PHP, Laravel are our main back end stack, the most popular PHP framework currently.
Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis are used for reliable storage of the main data.
Server:Docker, Kubernetes allow cost reduction for server infrastructure maintenance, CI/CD processes.
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