Western Union Implements ReactorCX to Power MyWU Loyalty Program
DENVER-Loyalty Methods (LM) and Western Union (NYSE: WU) recently completed the large-scale and complex project of migrating WU’s MyWU loyalty program to LM’s ReactorCX loyalty cloud platform. The project was delivered in a record eight months from start to finish and with zero downtime, parallel cutover deployment.
ReactorCX is now the system of record for the loyalty program which is available to customers in 35 countries, processing all Western Union loyalty transactions, 24x7x365. The new system will improve customer as well as marketer experience, enabling Western Union to deliver new types of loyalty initiatives at scale, in a seamless and efficient manner. ReactorCX is built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure offering LM customers a cost-effective and powerful loyalty solution with unlimited scalability, superior reliability, and flexibility for growth well into the future.
“This great success story was a testament to the strong partnership between LM and WU teams, the proven scalability and flexibility of the ReactorCX platform, and 15 years of LM’s multi-industry experience in the loyalty space,” said Emil Sarkissian, Loyalty Methods CEO, “with our innovative zero-downtime parallel cutover method, we have set a new standard of how smoothly these migrations should go.”
WU required that the project be done without any system outage or impact to their customers during the rollout. By utilizing its proven Threadsync delivery methodology, LM was able to deliver on this and many other requirements and ensure a completely seamless switch into the new platform with no downtime. The new system also contains all of the required and necessary historical and current transactional data, which was moved safely without any errors or data loss.
“Partnering with LM to upgrade MyWU is a key milestone in our strategy to become more ‘intelligent’ about what our customers expect from our loyalty program. It will allow us to offer more and better added-value experiences, and build better and deeper customer relationships. LM’s focus on innovation, agility, and successful, seamless delivery has made a massive difference in our efforts,” said Lucy Donaldson Head, Loyalty, MarTech & Consumer Ecosystems for Western Union.
Technical Excellence
- Project delivery in less than eight months, start to finish.
- Zero downtime deployment. Zero impact to customers.
- Flexible and comprehensive REST APIs that enable easy connectivity between customer touchpoints such as multiple types of POS systems and Mobile Apps.
- Modern cloud-native microservice architecture built in the Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Supports WU operations around the world, – 24x7x365 – without any downtime ever.
- Flexible, real-time rules engine able to evaluate a comprehensive list of built-in and custom eligibility criteria for the MyWU program.
- Configuration over coding. Reduction in the amount of time to create new program initiatives, from weeks/months down to days.
- “Planet”-Scale in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. More like “Several-Planets” -Scale.
- Advanced Integration within WU legacy infrastructure, systems, and all customer touchpoints.
- Event APIs support instant personalized communication, fraud detection, and support for any other near-real-time use cases whenever a member interacts with MyWU.
- Direct access to data via ReactorCX data warehouse which is refreshed every 30 minutes.
- Rich and extensible data model where an unlimited number of extension fields can be attached to any of the RCX base entities.
- Continuous technical innovation of the ReactorCX platform.
Advanced Program Capabilities
- Flexible real-time loyalty engine able to issue rewards for any activity, purchase or non-purchase, store or digitally.
- WU marketers can quickly rollout and execute new promos.
- Advanced segmentation beyond level codes.
- Timely, detailed reporting/tracking with a rich set of dashboards and direct access to SQL data in the ReactorCX data warehouse refreshed every 30 minutes.
- Automation of promo budgets, time-/cost-limits, expirations, alerts, etc.
- Rich data to track, learn, optimize and enhance program ROI.
- Improved access and visibility into liability and accounting data.
- Quick integration to new initiatives.
- Frictionless, consistent, timely program delivery across all channels.
- Create highly personalized triggered and targeted promotional communication with every member interaction in real-time and with any content such as email, push, overlays, etc. almost instantly upon completion of an activity.
- Recognize and reward non-MT behaviors to expand earn options, even including burn options that are fulfilled externally.
- Drive immediate repeat loyalty behavior and stickiness with support for subscriptions, streaks, challenges, etc.
- Reduce the need for customers to call the customer service center.