How does one of the largest enterprises in Korea keep customers loyal and happy? With compelling, customer-centric marketing. As the marketing hub for LOTTE Group, Korea's fifth-largest conglomerate, LOTTE Members handles the customer loyalty and analytics strategies for more than a dozen of the group's affiliates encompassing food and beverage, shopping, finance, construction, amusement parks, hotels, trade, energy, and sports businesses.

Headquartered in Seoul, LOTTE Members is a big data-driven consulting firm with 40 million users. Its loyalty program, L.POINT, is Korea's largest loyalty marketing platform. Members can take advantage of sales and specials as well as use L.pay, an easy-to-use payment service used at more than 500,000 merchants throughout Asia. Loyalty points can also be earned and redeemed across 180 of the most popular brands in the region via website, mobile app, or in brick-and-mortar stores.

Tracking and managing loyalty points for 40 million users, as well as analyzing customer behavior to drive usage and provide a better experience, was growing into an impossible challenge. The existing set of systems allowed only limited functionality, and the company was building campaigns at random without a clear strategy. This made it difficult to target appropriate audiences and gather and measure performance results. The outdated architecture also made it next to impossible to identify weaknesses and make changes accordingly.

All of this resulted in lower than expected campaign performance and dissatisfied customers, with no clear strategy for how to improve. Without an event-based platform enabling real-time visibility, real-time understanding, and real-time action, LOTTE had difficulties understanding its customer base and making decisions that could improve their experience. It was time for a transformation.

LOTTE sought an enterprise solution that could be easily accessed and managed by marketing professionals. Thus, the LOTTE Members Marketing System (LMMS) was born. At the foundation of LMMS lies the TIBCO Connected Intelligence platform, which enables users to develop, deploy, and analyze complex event scenarios.

With TIBCO, LOTTE gained an omnichannel view of its customers available on one easy-to-use interface. The integration, messaging, and in-memory-based event-processing engine at the heart of the TIBCO platform made agile development and deployment of complex event scenarios not only possible, but easy to execute. Additionally, LMMS gave LOTTE a view of these events as they played out in real time, empowering the company to now recognize strengths and weaknesses in its builds and make changes on the spot.

Overall, TIBCO technology enables LOTTE to respond rapidly to changing business conditions and customer needs. With a new architecture, marketers now have a much easier time providing great offers with an improved user interface and experience. They can now implement intuitive marketing scenarios (such as right-time offers and other personalized services at scale) with very little programming required, helping them drive more revenue for LOTTE’s portfolio of companies.

With ever-changing market dynamics and a variety of target audiences to consider, this new flexible system greatly simplified processes while also opening up new channels for communication, including social media targeting and mobile push notifications.

LOTTE can now plan and execute complex event-based campaigns that are targeted to specific audiences within its member base. The company nearly doubled the number of events it processes in real time, from 8 to 15 million.

Using the real-time information collected via L.POINT and L.pay transactions, LOTTE now has the ability to provide personalized offers, such as coupons and discounts, to customers at the ideal time. Today, it sends more than 300,000 messages to L.POINT members every hour three times the messages it was sending before adopting TIBCO.

Since the firm has partnered with TIBCO, LOTTE's marketing campaigns have significantly improved, leading to more loyal and happier customers. As RanSook Chung, vice president and head of data analytics for LOTTE Members explains, "LOTTE Members provides personalized services. To this end, LMMS, based on TIBCO’s Connected Intelligence platform, plays an essential role for more sophisticated, data-driven decisions for real-time contextual marketing. By constantly taking on new challenges and pursuing innovation, we deliver value exceeding customer expectations."

This newfound visibility into customer behavior resulted in lower operating costs and faster time-to-market with agile responses to captured events, because it eliminated much of the guesswork associated with previous marketing campaigns. Looking forward, LOTTE not only plans to keep TIBCO at the heart of its operations but is also exploring TIBCO's hyperconverged analytics solutions with a goal of further refining the customer experience through more personalized and sophisticated offers.