Gamification Solution for Retailers Worldwide

Introduction

A marketing agency came to Elinext with the goal of updating an existing solution that allows users to play games and attract customers to visit brick-and-mortar facilities (shops, cafes, etc.) as well as online stores (e.g., internet providers) through these games. Any game the customer plays rewards them with prizes or discounts, and to get the prices/use the discount the user has to visit a physical place or go to an online store. The game (before the update, the solution had a choice between two games) acts as a marketing service for any business that has a goal of attracting more customers to their shops, malls, restaurants, and so on. The client had a list of enterprise customers that used this marketing service.

Challenge

The client requested to build a stable, flexible, and high-scalable solution based on their existing one. The solution would use different games to run marketing campaigns and attract people to physical and online stores and eating facilities. The Elinext team had to:

• Build a management tool to configure campaigns with a central identity server;
• Create modern UI and make it easily configurable;
• Implement cross-platform core services;
• Integrate the solution with third-party services;
• Develop real-time reporting and statistics for campaigns;
• Develop a public API to provide external access.

Solution

Module 1: Management tool

Management tool allows full campaign configuration by the marketing agency. The marketing manager can define the user flow for marketing campaigns and customize marketing campaigns depending on the required conditions. More than 20 games that reward the end-user with the prize were created from scratch. For every game, the solution makes it possible to choose its own language, geography, branding, settings, prize pool, discounts, targeting scenarios, ads, and so on.

Module 2: Reporting and statistics

All analytics, statistics, and reporting of the end-users (the clients of the marketing service, i.e. shops, restaurants, etc) were added by the Elinext team. The client can view all user's activity: times the games were played, number of prizes received, top prizes, daily redemptions, time from win to redemption, etc. The solution allows real-time reporting and statistics for big data (over 1 000 000 rows). It’s possible to download Excel reports, visual analytics, data aggregation reports, etc.

Module 3: Customer Support Tool

The end-user of our solution (shop, restaurant, etc.) can search all of the game players by phone numbers and see all of their activities. They can see which games they’ve played, when have they played them, which prize/discount was redeemed, and so on. It’s also possible to view and edit personal information. It’s done for customer support so that the customer could grant a prize, check the redemption status, and so on.

Module 4: Public API

The software provides an API for the purposes of integration. Customers can connect to the system and integrate it with their own solutions in real-time.

Module 5: System Core

The solution was upgraded to .Net Core 6. This ensures that the solution is fast and scalable. It allows to use Linux servers and provides benefits such as saving costs, fast scaling, and the use of live monitoring. There was also a challenge with the system overload and DDoS attacks. To solve this challenge, the team used Azure’s service in combination with a Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Result

The solution has multiple clients around the world with millions of users. The Elinext team keeps supporting the solution and developing new features on request. The upcoming features are game previews and updating the menu feature so that the user could see their own history details and statistics. Elinext is a team of highly skilled professionals who thrive on tackling stimulating and captivating projects. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with Elinext to know more about our development services.

Related Cases: Exploring Innovative Retail Solutions