A Loyalty Program for Members and Administrators

CAA

Mobile app and Web platform
B2C and B2E

Overview

CAA in a few key numbers

With over 6.5 million active members that benefit from rewards in more than 124 000 partner locations, CAA assists Canadian local communities through its eight regional Clubs.

Our Mandate

As a CAA National partner, nventive had two goals to reach through this collaboration: designing and developing a mobile app for all CAA Members throughout the different Clubs to offer an identical experience – and developing an easy-to-use web platform for CAA’s administrators.

Our Realizations

Digital strategy
Research on competition
Understanding the business rules
User research
User experience design
User interface design
Front-end development
Back-end development
Optimization and support

Technologies

Multi-platform application logic: C# and .Net
Multi-Platform UI: Uno Platform, Uno.material
CI/CD Pipelines: Azure Pipelines
Cloud infrastructure: Azure AppService, Azure Application Insights, Azure Storage, Azure Keyvault, SQL Database, Azure App Configuration, Azure AD B2C, Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Search Service, Azure Front Door and CDN profiles
Push notifications: OneSignal

Collaborate to Create

CAA National’s and nventive’s teams have collaborated by using a design thinking approach and the Agile method to develop a digital solution centered on the Members’ and the administrators’ needs and expectations. Our teams have been able to align strategies to the eight different Clubs’ existing internal and external system possibilities and constraints.

The Developed Digital Solutions

The CAA National App

In addition to offering roadside assistance, the CAA National mobile app allows Members to take advantage of their benefits quickly and easily, to find exclusive offers, to collect CAA dollars, and to monitor the savings made. To summarize, it enables each Member to maximize their experience and to make the best use of their membership!

Roadside Assistance

The mobile app, which is available on iOS and Android, allows access to roadside assistance in only a few clicks without having to call someone. On top of roadside assistance, the app offers features such as real-time monitoring of the tow truck, quick geolocation of CAA’s partners, and access to the Member’s profile that includes their digital membership card.

Loyalty Program

As we know, mobile apps are at the heart of loyalty programs: indeed, offers need to be easily accessed by the clients and communicated to them so that benefits can be exploited to their full potential.

CAA’s loyalty program has been created to ensure an identical experience to its eight Clubs’ different Members – while offering a personalized service depending on the Member’s region. In fact, the app suggests a variety of offers and discounts in different categories: restaurants, shops, finance, home, events, etc. Offers and discounts can be filtered by geolocation or by preference types. The app also enables the presentation of digital offers to show the entirety of benefits to the Members.

Also, the CAA Clubs can communicate to their Members through a messaging feature to provide them with information, ranging from driving tips to special partner offers.

The Admin Tool Web Platform

To operate a large-scale loyalty program such as this one, it is of the utmost importance to have the right tools for an efficient management. This is exactly the admin tool platform’s role: to allow coordinators and administrators to properly manage their Club’s content and messaging system. The platform includes the following features:

Content App

Managers can use this platform to configure the different messages that will be sent through CAA National’s mobile app. In addition to the roadside assistance message configuration, the platform can serve as a content management system (CMS): created with Angular, it enables the user to write messages, articles, and different contents in the platform, as well as to set the publishing date, time and duration. The system also allows to write general welcome messages addressed to new Members and to Members who regularly use the mobile app.

Marketing Tool

As a marketing tool for CAA’s administrators, this app can enhance the program’s reputation and it ensures Members are contacted at the right time. It facilitates a regular contact between the brand and its consumers, which fosters better retention.

Main Challenges We Overcame

Defining a Common Vision

One of CAA National’s main challenges was to rally eight regional Clubs behind a single common vision, while considering the diversity of their services, their strategies, their respective existing ecosystems, and the different time zones. By adopting a user-centric approach, we piloted a series of cocreating workshops, which allowed us to build a vision based on the Members’ needs and expectations.

British Columbia Automobile Association (BCAA)
Alberta Motor Association (AMA)
CAA Saskatchewan
CAA Club Group
CAA Niagara
CAA North & East Ontario
CAA Québec
CAA Atlantique

Ensuring a Flawless User Experience

To be able to offer the best experience, a comprehensive analysis of the user interface was necessary. The challenge for our UX design experts was to simultaneously achieve two distinct objectives: to offer a roadside assistance service as well as a loyalty program. To successfully overcome this challenge, our experts developed several models drawn from research and user tests.

Secondly, our UI design team, which relied on brand-image research, was able to optimize the user interface by leveraging iconography principles.

«
Because each Club has its own brand image, we had to work on visual concepts with which all Members could identify. So, we decided to focus on two elements: colours (white, red and blue) and the distinctive angles for typography in the CAA logo.»
David A. Hamel VP of Strategy, CX and Design

Creating a Unique Development Process

Among CAA’s eight Clubs, the British Columbia Automobile Association and the Alberta Motor Association have their own brand identity. This situation should have required the creation of three distinct apps, but our experts found another alternative: they developed one code for three apps. By allowing the replacement of texts, images and different features, this solution turned out to be more efficient in terms of costs and test times – while also significantly reducing the risk of errors.

Managing the Complexity in Test Phases

The CAA app contains hundreds of features shared in the eight Clubs or respective to each: roadside assistance with different APIs, real time monitoring, a loyalty program, connection process, various membership tiers… The quality control phase required many test scenarios to ensure an optimal operation for the users. In collaboration with CAA’s IT teams, we successfully led a series of complex tests, optimized the user interface and minimized the friction points in the user experience.

«
We parametered code compilation instead of duplicating it. This way, we get three apps (CAA, AMA, and BCAA) with the same code. It’s a big advantage during tests, because we know the behaviour will be the same in the different apps. We can simply focus on comparing content (images and texts) instead of reviewing every single feature.»
Jean-Philippe Lévesque, Team lead and Developer

Results

Thanks to the app and the admin tool platform, all of CAA’s Clubs provide a safe driving experience to its Members while enabling them to fully benefit from offers and discounts!