Inspiration
Situated in Singapore where many merchants have their own loyalty programmes, we find ourselves having to carry many cards in our wallets everywhere we go. This is to ensure that we do not miss out on any promotions that are only entitled to members. However, this makes it extremely inconvenient and troublesome for us to have a wallet full of cards that we do not use on an everyday basis. Hence, we thought there should be a platform that onboards famous merchants so we can store our cards in there and be more involved in these loyalty programmes.
What it does
CustomersFirst is a Customer Loyalty Software that allows customers to save their cards online. Gone are the days where customers have to bring all their membership cards wherever they go and they can say goodbye to bulky wallets.
Using our mobile app, customers can save their cards digitally and not need to bring their cards out anymore. Furthermore, they can view the points they have accumulated so far and be notified of the expiry date of the points. Lastly, customers can combine their existing points to make a purchase at a shop. This will maximise the effectiveness of loyalty programmes designed by individual shops.
To ensure equal opportunities for every merchant, there will be a quota set on the number of redemptions a customer can make at a store.
How we built it
The project was created using React Native, using Expo to bootstrap our project. We also made use of other frontend libraries to beautify our UI.
Challenges I ran into
A key challenge was to come up with a concrete idea that allows us to differentiate ourselves from other competitors. For example, there are apps such as Stocard and Perkd in Singapore currently that allow customers to store their cards online. Even though these apps may not be that widely used here, we had a difficult time framing our direction and coming up with specific features that make our app stand out from the rest.
Another challenge was to familiarise ourselves with mobile app development and implementing the technical details. Even though most of us had experience with React, for some of us, it was our first attempt at mobile app development. It was challenging to familiarise ourselves with the intricacies of mobile app development.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Eventually, we managed to deviate from just having the storing of cards feature. We thought of additional features such as allowing promotions and discounts by each merchant to be posted on our app and most importantly, provide a platform for customers to make use of their unused loyalty points.
What I learned
Crystallizing our thoughts and ideas of building a customer loyalty app, now with added features and a clearer direction Improving our understanding of React, Material UI and mobile app design
What's next for CustomersFirst
Improve the user experience of our mobile app, provide more customised UI for each merchant Carry out further market validation with our friends and visitors of malls to try out the mobile app, and improve the app based on their advice
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