Cathay Pacific’s Rewards Programme Happy with its Blockchain Port
In May last year, the Cathay Pacific Group, via its rewards programme Asia Miles, launched an app utilising smart contracts via blockchain.
The campaign at the core of the new platform was a newly launched Asia Miles dining promotion in Hong Kong. Asia Miles members will have their miles credited to their accounts the following day, an unusual move from the usual months-long process for calculating miles before.
Today, it’s now close to a year since Asia Miles has incorporated blockchain into its operations, and it has been an interesting journey of melding the regular call center-style operations Cathay Pacific had been doing until recently, with the tech-forward blockchain-based operations.
Seemingly to commemorate their now almost 1-year-old dalliance with blockchain, Forbes held an interview with Micheal Yung, the Head of Digital Product and Technology at Asia Miles. According to Forbes, Micheal has helped grow the company and helped it continue its evolution into becoming a digital leader in the loyalty space for 5 years now.
The Asia Miles loyalty programme was launched in 1999, accumulating over 11 million members, and about 700 partners around the world to serve those members.
As a 20-year-old programme that previously primarily operated via newsletters and call centers, making the shift to blockchain requires a partnership team that is able to work with its extensive partner list to ensure that targeted members are channeled to the partners so they can grow their business.
There is also the issue of providing the right offers, products and services to members so that they see Asia Miles as something of value.
As a result, of the blockchain port, the typical several-month wait for bonuses to arrive at the consumers has been shortened to mere hours via smart contracts—as this removed the need for real-life teams to make the calculations, data retrieval, and reconciliations before awarding bonus hours.
Yet, Micheal reports that they still have members who have been around for more than a decade that still prefer the call center.
Then, it is all about finding a better way to sell their offers to the right members: which Asia Miles attempts to do so by tabulating their persona, their lifetime value and their stage in life.
Looking ahead, Micheal is now eyeing self service technologies like chatbots and robotic process automation. For one thing, these technologies improve back-office efficiency and allow them to link legacy systems together.
As such, they continue to be deeply interested in blockchain and smart contract technology, as with their loyalty program, Asia Miles can save time and effort in reconciliation, data integrity and other important areas.
Asia Miles has its contemporaries across the globe. Malaysia’s AirAsia, around the same time, announced that it was mulling a cryptocurrency-based rewards program as well, and Singapore Airlines’ KrisFlyer, was set to launch a new digital wallet app, powered by blockchain.
(the source of news: https://fintechnews.hk/9231/blockchain/cathay-pacific-asia-miles-blockchain-rewards-program-smart-contracts/)