Alliance Data Streamlines Customer Communications Management

The Company: Alliance Data

Alliance Data is a leading provider of marketing, loyalty, and credit solutions that uses the power of data to achieve results for their clients. Together, their three lines of business manage more than 100 million consumer relationships for some of the world’s leading brands.

“We’re big fans of Messagepoint. The platform has given us the tools we need to maximize our statement capability, making it much easier to manage the varying communication needs of our clients, and provide them more marketing opportunities. We like the platform so much, we’ve made the decision to migrate our letter applications over to Messagepoint for all our clients as well.”

Renee Somers, Product Manager & Capability Manager, Alliance Data

The Challenge

The passing of the Credit Cardholders Bill (also known as the Credit CARD Act of 2009) drove the requirements for a timely statement redesign that needed to be rolled out to Alliance Data’s portfolio of more than 130 unique client brands before a February 2010 deadline.

Each client possessed their own unique messaging and branding requirements, resulting in a complex, high-volume hierarchy of customer message variations that was difficult, expensive and time-consuming to manage. Further, onboarding new customer statements was an IT project requiring system changes and testing cycles. Since Alliance Data had already been looking to move off of their existing legacy solution to a new deployment of OpenText™ Exstream™, they determined this statement redesign project would be the best time to do it.

During the implementation of OpenText™ Exstream™, it became apparent that Alliance Data needed the ability for non-technical business users to manage their sophisticated messaging requirements without involving IT.

ADS chose Messagepoint to fill that need.

The Solution

Leveraging their proven Integrated Approach methodology, Messagepoint began with a series of detailed sessions to understand Alliance Data’s statement and end-user requirements. Once the requirements were locked down, Messagepoint’s world-class statement design team set out creating the initial statement designs. Given Alliance Data had 130 clients with 130 different sets of unique messages, the solution required considerable attention to detail and programming of both OpenText™ Exstream™ and configuring Messagepoint’s Messagepoint platform. In less than a year, Alliance Data had successfully rolled out newly redesigned statements to all 130 clients.

The redesigned statements were not only more visually appealing and easier to manage, they had also successfully achieved compliance with the Credit CARD Act legislation, and avoided fines and other penalties.

A key differentiator that Messagepoint brought to the project was the Messagepoint Customer Messaging Management software platform. After the new Alliance Data client statement designs were complete, Messagepoint and it’s patent pending variation management functionality enabled Alliance Data to onboard new customers and provide quick and easy management for all messaging content destined for the new statements through a centralized and intuitive user interface.

Messagepoint gave business users the control they needed to manage customer communications more effectively. Alliance Data observed that Messagepoint simplified and standardized their customer engagement process while streamlining customer customizations, targeted messages, approvals, and compliance with geographic regulations. The result was reduced costs, reduced time to market and most importantly satisfied and engaged consumers.

Benefits

Not only was Alliance able to achieve timely compliance with the new legislation but their client statements also:

• Improved customer experience because they are more colorful, intuitive and visually appealing,
• Enabled easier and faster changes for more timely communications,
• Required no IT intervention to implement message changes faster, and
• Facilitated “insert” management to easily add promotions or relevant offers in a timely manner.

Other benefits achieved through Messagepoint include:

• Messagepoint reduced timely and costly statement runs,
• Reduced printing costs by moving from costly preprinted compliant paper stock to full color, duplex print capability on standard paper stock,
• Moved to a more economical “buy” versus “build” solution model, and
• Migrated business users from complex “green screens” to a much friendlier UI.

Get the full Customer Story PDF