Introduction
MAF Properties owns and operates three of Dubai’s most popular malls – Mall of the Emirates, Deira City Centre and Mirdif City Centre, which dominate the city’s retail and leisure offering. The three malls are also at the heart of Dubai Shopping Festival and Dubai Summer Surprises (DSS) – festivals that bring together events, carnivals and, most importantly, retail celebrations in the emirate. As a partner and sponsor, MAF Malls holds weekly draws over the course of DSF and DSS, and a grand prize at the end of the promotion period, to reward shoppers for their loyalty and custom.
Background
MAF engaged Flip to develop and deploy a revolutionary, digital system to manage and report on all MAF shopping centre raffle and draw activities, with the following specific business objectives:
- Reduce time required for registration at customer service desks
- Capture consumer data correctly
- Speed and efficiency in communication of raffle entries and information regarding the winning draw
- Transparency to allow government officials from Dubai Economic Department to remotely monitor draws and select winners
- Ability to communicate, download, track, and trend data in real time
Challenges
Raffles and draws are traditionally run offline and people have been familiar with the offline system for some time now. We needed to develop an online system that would not only reward raffle entries but also answer MAF Malls’ larger business objectives while also being scalable and transferrable to MAF’s shopping centres outside of Dubai and across the Middle East and North Africa.
Being transferrable brought with it another challenge – we had to assume that Internet access would not always be available, and any lack of connection would result in backlogs on the coupons tracking, approvals, and send outs.
Approach
After examining the current offline raffle system it was clear that our solution would have to be easy to use, and have significant capacity to handle a large amount of data on a daily basis.
The above reason combined with the fact that the Internet was not a constant, we developed a native application using Adobe Air. Adobe Air allowed us to create an application for MAF where all customer data and coupon information was stored natively without an Internet connection. Using Adobe Air allowed us to store all the customer data, including coupons for each customer, directly on the application so that it could be retrieved at any time – without any time lag and always up to date.
The application was installed at each and every customer service location within MAF’s shopping centres and the customer service team was trained to use the application.
When an Internet connection became available, all the customer data and coupon information was sent to Flip’s secure server and stored.
A login prompt allowed for real-time tracking to show who was using the application, what data was being entered and so forth for instant reporting.
Results
The customer service team found the system easy to use, making it a viable option for transfer to other malls in other countries, from a user’s perspective.
Shoppers and end-users were equally charmed by the simple, efficient and easy-to-use application. Almost 840,500 total purchases were recorded and over 98,600 users registered themselves during the promotion period.
