Odeon Cinemas Premiere Club a hit at the box office
At the beginning of 2009, Odeon Cinemas took the decision to introduce a customer loyalty card across its chain of cinemas. The Odeon Premiere Club card (OPC) was intended to reward customers’ loyalty by awarding points for each purchase which could be saved and then used on either cinema tickets or food and drinks in the cinemas.
Preview Services was invited to tender for the account management of the project – this covered all aspects of providing the individual pilot cinemas with the OPC welcome packs, as well as fulfilling the online loyalty card orders generated from the Odeon Cinema’s website. In addition to the production of the welcome packs, Preview was required to set up and run the key operations that would deal with the daily processing of the card activation forms. This service included the scanning, archiving and data capture of customer details, all to be carried out within 24 hours from receipt of the card activation forms.
The initial pilot scheme was run in 10 cinemas over an 8 week period during June and July of 2009 – however, the reaction was so overwhelmingly positive that the decision was taken to roll out the Odeon Premiere Club card across its entire estate of 103 cinemas nationwide in August.
Preview Services was selected as the partner for the full project based on the breadth of experience it could bring to the project directly, as well as its ability to work with and manage the specialist companies required to make the project a success. This required Preview to manage 3 key aspects of the operation covering the initial sourcing and delivery of the packs, the subsequent response handling and online storage of the information as well as the processing of the information from the website.
The first phase entailed sourcing and managing both a card manufacturer and a fulfilment and logistics company that could produce, personalise and deliver 500,000 cards and welcome packs to individual Odeon cinemas nationwide. Then, when the forms were returned, the response handling operation needed to deal with them quickly and efficiently so that Odeon’s customer service team would have immediate access to the information if required.
There was also a constant flow of activation forms sent in directly by Odeon’s customers, and these were scanned and then uploaded into the main eView+ web based system along with any accompanying correspondence. The final element covered the processing of online loyalty card orders which arrived via the Odeon Cinema website. To achieve this, the data network was set up to receive and download regular data files from the website which enabled individual card orders to be matched, fulfilled and then mailed out to customers within a 24 hour period.
The success of a film is measured by the numbers at the box office and for a project of this type the same principle applies – if the customers visit and then use and benefit from the card then it can be considered a success. So far, as we approach the end of 2009, the response has been excellent with the majority of cinema goers signing up and using the Odeon Premiere Club card. With that level of participation and a smooth operation working behind the scenes, the future success of the programme for all concerned looks to be assured.