A retail chain was handing out plastic loyalty cards. One in three cards got lost in the first month, and half of the rest stayed at home. Customers stood at the register digging through their wallets, the cashier waited, and in the end the purchase went through with no points. The program was running on empty.
The alternative was a mobile app. But that means roughly $50–65K in development, a year of work on two platforms, ads to get customers to install it, and a fight against uninstalls 2 weeks later. For a chain with annual revenue of up to about $6.7M, that cost is out of proportion.
80% of the chain's shoppers already had Telegram. The task was to build the loyalty program right inside the messenger, so customers could open it in one tap, see their points, get personal offers and complete quests, with no downloads and no sign-up.
