Loyalty NZ Selects AWS to Build Customer Engagement Platform That Will Transform Flybuys programme

Machine Learning and Data Analytics unlock insights to drive hyper-personalised offers for Flybuys members

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, 1 December, 2021 -- Today, Loyalty NZ, a national data-driven customer engagement, loyalty, and analytics firm, announced it is developing a customer engagement platform using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver highly automated, personalised, and relevant offers to its Flybuys members. The new platform comes as Loyalty NZ nears the end of a multi-year project to migrate all its systems to the AWS Cloud, with the Flybuys website migration due to complete in February 2022.

Flybuys is the longest-running and leading loyalty and rewards programme in New Zealand, serving 80% of the country’s households and working with partners like New World, BNZ, State Insurance (IAG), Z, and Caltex to drive more than 100 million customer contacts a year. With AWS as its preferred cloud provider, Loyalty NZ will leverage the speed, agility, and scalability of AWS to tap into its own customer data sets to help its partners better understand their customers and deliver relevant Flybuys offers with greater variety, value, and cost savings.

To engage members with relevant partner offers, Loyalty NZ needed to modernise its technology systems and develop a customer engagement platform capable of leveraging the full potential of the company’s enormous data set, accumulated over its 25-year history. Loyalty NZ manages 55 terabytes of customer data for its members, with 2 gigabytes added daily from 400 different data sources, including retail transaction data from its Flybuys online store. With the company’s two legacy on-premises data centres no longer able to process and analyse data fast and deep enough, Loyalty NZ is migrating all its systems to the AWS Cloud, including its transaction engine, data platform, and its rewards store, automating the entire data management process on AWS. Leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS’ capabilities, including storage, analytics, and machine learning (ML), Loyalty NZ is now closer to delivering more rich, timely, and targeted marketing campaigns and sales promotions, making the Flybuys mobile app and online store a daily engagement driver and key sales channel for 2.9 million customers across New Zealand.

Loyalty NZ stores customer data on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA), a managed orchestration service for the Apache Airflow that makes it easier to set up and operate end-to-end data pipelines in the cloud at scale. This makes Loyalty NZ’s online sales channels more reliable, ensuring business continuity during spikes of up to six times the usual demand during sales and promotions like Black Friday and Boxing Day. Using Amazon Athena, an interactive query service, and AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service, Loyalty NZ ingests, catalogues, and analyses partner data, including member shopping preferences and purchase history to ensure only the most relevant offers reach its members. This automation accelerated Loyalty NZ’s daily data intake from 27 hours to four hours, with some analysis tasks reduced from six hours to minutes. The saved time enables data scientists to improve their customer targeting and Loyalty NZ to deliver more relevant and valuable offers to members.

“AWS has helped us build New Zealand’s leading customer engagement platform, bringing members and partners together on the country’s favourite loyalty programme in a meaningful way,” said Brian Ferris, Chief Technology and Data Officer, Loyalty NZ. “By using AWS’s advanced cloud capabilities, including data analytics and machine learning, we gain the agility and speed we need to use our member data set to deliver relevant and valuable campaigns that help our partners thrive and our members to get value from Flybuys every day.”

“Loyalty NZ is using AWS to deliver more meaningful value to its Flybuys members while helping its partners build customer relationships that last,” said Dr. Haren Samarasakera, Head of Territory for AWS New Zealand. “By automating the data management and analytics process at scale in the cloud, Loyalty NZ creates deeper connections between Flybuys members and partners through more relevant offers, making the shopping experience more rewarding for customers.”

About Flybuys
Flybuys is New Zealand’s largest loyalty programme, rewarding New Zealanders for the things they do every day. New Zealanders can do their day-to-day shopping and spending with Flybuys partners, collect Flybuys points, and choose how to be rewarded. Members can choose between Flybuys Points to spend on thousands of products and experiences in the Flybuys Store, additional fuel discounts from Z and Caltex, or New World Dollars to save on groceries. And on top of this, members get Flybuys Extras - a range of quality-brand treats, deals and offers. There are over 50 partners across the country and online where Kiwis can collect points – from retail stores to services for the home like electricity and insurance.

The Flybuys programme has 2.9 million members across 80% of New Zealand households.

About Loyalty NZ
Loyalty NZ is a data-driven customer engagement and analytics firm and has been helping New Zealand businesses build lasting relationships with their customers for the last 25 years. In 1996, Loyalty NZ launched Flybuys, New Zealand's first and favourite loyalty programme. For 25 years, we’ve specialised in using data to help New Zealand businesses know more about their customers, so they can meaningfully engage with them. Our two brands - Flybuys and Lab360 - allow us to incorporate NZ’s favourite loyalty programme with the richest customer dataset in the country, under one roof. Lab360 is a highly regarded end-to-end data analytics consultancy, helping businesses solve their customer problems with robust, high-quality data sets, industry-leading technology, and a talented, savvy team.