Building Club Boozt: A Tailor-Made Customer Club Solution

How we built the technology behind Club Boozt as a stepwise project involving most of the tech teams in Boozt in close collaboration with the commercial team.

Club Boozt is a customer club solution tailored 100 percent to fit not only our business and our customers but also our Department Store strategy. The introduction of the club is an important commercial investment and also a significant technical achievement. The solution expands the signup flow and utilizes core business data such as customer segmentation and order history to enable state-of-the-art customization, personalised offers, and discounts combined with an amazing customer experience.

To a large degree, we have turned the shopping desk around by letting the customers themselves define what is the most important service dimension — whether it is to be first in line at the pre-sale, to be treated specially by the different brand walls we offer, to receive even better category defined deals, to have priority packing of orders or to get VIP customer service. We leave all these choices up to the individual and have probably introduced the first 100% personalised club concept. This can only be done by controlling and adapting the data, the system and the processes around all customer touchpoints.

We always like to be in control of our technical set up. We hate to be dependent on others, which is why Club Boozt is powered by infrastructure developed in-house by our Platform teams. Ultimately we want it to be a smooth experience that encourages customers to shop in more of our categories, always making sure we meet customer expectations.

Prototyping the Club

As aforementioned, the main concept of Club Boozt is to offer a wide variety of services that the customer can choose between. It was therefore realised early in the project that it would not be possible to specify all details of the solution. So the collaboration between the commercial business owners and the tech managers in the Platform Team focused on identifying configurable components that together would shape up the club throughout the touchpoints. We will elaborate on these components that we named “Boozters” below.

The product designers were involved early on to shape the commercial ideas into visual prototypes that gave the project participants an idea of what direction the club was heading towards at an early stage. This involved changes to the sign-up flow, the product pages, the checkout, the order-related emails, the app notifications, the customer service pages, etc. All these elements gradually converged towards the final version for development, while mockup data was replaced step-by-step by real life data.

An example of an early prototype from the cub illustrating the process of choosing a Boozter.

Technical components

When you interact with the club e.g. by signing up or choosing the Boozters (the service improvements you can buy for the points in the club) it all seems pretty intuitive and simple. Really it is not. All the different components in the club are identified by complicated business rules that cannot be found in any off-the-shelf product. There is no best practice for this type of club because it simply does not exist anywhere else. But because we have full control of not only the apps and the webshop but also all our internal systems, we have been able to expand all the systems to be implemented for Club Boozt. So the club is not represented by a single system but by changes in pretty much all of our business systems. Here are some examples of this:

Web Shop: changes to sign-up flow with additional information, product presentation with information on Boozt relationship (e.g. discount or pre-sale) and My Boozt account information.

Mobile Apps: same as the above plus Notification system for the app user.

Warehouse Management System: logics regarding orders with priority picking.

Merchandising: alignment with deals for brands and categories, pre-sale access and coordination with vendors.

Content Management: setting up banners, deals, content for the club.

Finance System: integration for payments, fee structures and membership payments.

CRM: subscription logics, customer segmentation, notification logics and email invitations.

Customer Service: Information about customer Boozters, membership type and VIP access.

Above is a breakdown of some of the child projects Phase 1 of the club has contained — so far. This said, we know a lot more will come in the following months.

Cross-company collaboration

Club Boozt has been an amazing cross-company journey so far. In less than 1 year collaboration across pretty much all departments in the company has made it possible to launch this very unique and highly personalised club experience for all our fantastic customers. Tech managers, product designers & managers as well as developers have collaborated with the commercial team as product owners. And the collaboration with Buying & Merchandising, Customer Service, Finance Team, Warehouse Operations has been extremely efficient.

Thank you everyone. Welcome to Club Boozt.

If you enjoyed this article, and want to read more great stories from the Boozt platform team, be sure to subscribe to the Boozt Tech publication!

Or perhaps you’re interested in joining our platform team? Then check out our careers page.