Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Incentive Solution Company Increases Competitiveness With New Web Technology
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Retail
Customer Profile
GiftCertificates.com, an Omaha-based incentive solution company, has millions of corporate and consumer customers. It employs about 130 people.
Business Situation
The company wanted to separate the consumer and corporate functions of its gift certificate Web site and improve its ability to quickly add features and usability to the customers’ online experience.
Solution
GiftCertificates.com is implementing a new corporate Web site based on Microsoft® .NET connection software that provides new features and flexibility.
Benefits
Agile Web environment for quick site modifications
Flexible development tools
Greater competitiveness due to improved customer satisfaction / “We feel the new Web site built on .NET [connection software] will help us reduce our customer service costs by up to 20 percent.”
Marty Roberts, Director of Project Management, GiftCertificates.com
GiftCertificates.com provides comprehensive incentive solutions for organizations that want to inspire their customers, employees, and partners. The company wanted to make its services even more compelling to attract additional customers, especially corporate customers that use gift certificates as incentives. In a strategic move, the company decided to create a new gift certificate redemption site specifically for organizations. Created with help from Quilogy, the site is based on the Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0, including Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0technology, and uses Web services that enable easier development and rapid changes to the site to accommodate customer needs. Company executives say the new technology is helping reduce internal costs while making possible new features that are attractive to customers.
Situation
GiftCertificates.com assists corporations that want to usegift certificates in their sales incentive and employee recognition programs. The incentive solution company also provides gift certificates and gifting advice to consumer audiences.
Founded in 1997, GiftCertificates.com today serves millions of corporate and consumer customers. It provides original merchant gift certificates, including national and local retailers, travel services, popular restaurants, and many other choices within the apparel, sports, home, electronics, and entertainment categories. The company's best-selling product is the SuperCertificate, a universal gift certificate redeemable online or by phone fororiginal gift certificates from hundreds of participating merchants.
The company’s growth over the past few years has created challenges. With more and more individuals and corporate customers signing on, GiftCertificates.com found that its IT systems lacked the flexibility to rapidly add or modify features and make it easier for customers to redeem SuperCertificates for their choice of gift certificates. Additionally, it was hard for the company to add more services that would appeal to corporate customers, including the ability to add a company’s brand name to a gift certificate redemption Web page.
“It was getting difficult and expensive for us to maintain a Web site that did everything for everyone,” says Sean Nathaniel, Director of Technology Development for GiftCertificates.com.“There was a lot of code complexity and development costs. We needed to find a better technology solution that would help us separate the corporate and consumer functionality—a solution that would help us streamline internal procedures and provide more services for each customer base.”
Solution
GiftCertificates.com found the answer with Microsoft® .NET connection software. The company worked with Quilogy, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to create a new gift certificate redemption site specifically designed for corporations. The site was developed using Microsoft ASP.NET version 2.0, a set of technologies in the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0(a component of the Microsoft Windows® operating system) that enables development of Web applications and Web services, and the Microsoft Visual C#®2005 development tool, part of the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system.
The corporate Web site, which launched in the first quarter of 2006, uses eight Web services that correspond to different site sections and functions, such as catalog pages, orders, marketing, and security and validation of user IDs. The Web services, which can be easily modified to work with specific business logic, are designed to access particular functions on the GiftCertificates.com site as needed toperform specific tasks.
Benefits
Building the new Web site on ASP.NET 2.0 isdelivering a number of benefits to GiftCertificates.com. The technology set offers a flexible, agile Web environment, making it easy for the company to modify andadd features. The development tools are more efficient for the GiftCertificates.com staff, which can use features such as MasterPages to streamline development work. And in the long term, the solution is expected to help the company acquire more customers and increaserevenue.
Agile Web Environment
The new technologies available in ASP.NET 2.0 help the incentive solution company modify and add features more quickly than in the past.“GiftCertificates.com has a group of Web services that it wants to be able to modify and make more readily available topartners,” says John Luddy, Managing Consultant at Quilogy. “With the ASP.NET 2.0 technology, it is very easy to change just one parameter to reflect a change in a business rule. For example, there could be a rule expressing that a customer wants to exclude certain merchants from the redemption options thatrecipients see.”
GiftCertificates.com is able to easily include additional features that make the overall customer experience more compelling. “We have added the ability to choose from our Select Merchant list with partners such as Best Buy, Circuit City, and Target,” says Marty Roberts, Director of Project Management at GiftCertificates.com. “With ASP.NET 2.0, we’ve been able to easily add features that present a unique list of merchants for each customer redeeming a SuperCertificate. This ensures that our customers find the gift card they want.”
Flexible Development Tools
The .NET connection software used in the solution provides the type of flexibility and streamlined development environment needed to create and easily maintain a profitable corporate gift certificate redemption site. “Adopting ASP.NET 2.0 was a strategic move,” Roberts says. “It makes it possible for us to easily maintain this site for a very specific target audience. And we’ll be able to do it with less expense and effort than in the past.”
One of the key technology features of ASP.NET 2.0 is MasterPages. MasterPages provide site-level page templates, a mechanism for fine-grained content replacement, programmatic and declarative control over which template a page should use, and integrated designer support through Visual Studio 2005.
“MasterPages is a great example of a tool that speeds up development work because there is just one master page with a single layout that is developed and then used over and over,” says Luddy. “This enables the type of flexibility that allows GiftCertificates.com to modify Web pages for specific corporate customers to suit their needs, including adding brand attributes like logos.”
Greater Competitiveness
The new technology set is helping the incentive solution company improve its competitiveness and increase profits. “This solution is going to positively affect our profitability in multiple ways,” says Roberts. “For example, it helps GiftCertificates.com create more merchant choices for customers and enables the company to offer custom branding on the site. These capabilities will entice and win more customers, driving our top-line revenue.”
GiftCertificates.com anticipates that the capabilities and efficiencies of the new solution will help it reduce the amount of resources devoted to customer service issues. “Any time we invest in improving customer satisfaction, it pays out dramatically for the organization,” Roberts says. “We feel the new Web site built on .NET [connection software] will help us reduce our customer service costs by up to 20 percent.”
The ability to quickly adapt features of GiftCertificates.com to meet customer needs helps the company get innovative offerings to market faster, which provides a competitive advantage. “The technology used for our new solution is helping us increase value to our customers,” Roberts says. “This helps differentiate us from the competition.”
Microsoft .NET
Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.
.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.
For more information about Microsoft .NETand Web services, please visit these Web sites:
msdn.microsoft.com/webservices