A prominent financial institution, with a strong focus on customer loyalty, had launched a cashback strategy that allowed its users to receive cash back for purchases made at specific merchants. This benefit was highly appreciated by customers, who valued the tangible reward for their daily purchases. However, the process of claiming cashback presented a considerable challenge for both customers and the company.
To claim their cashback, customers had to send a photograph of the purchase receipt, which was then verified by the company team. This manual process involved reviewing each ticket to confirm the validity of the purchase, ensuring that the date, store and items purchased matched the conditions of the cashback scheme. As the volume of requests grew, this manual verification became unsustainable, creating significant delays in cashback delivery and causing frustration for both the company team and customers.
The financial institution was at a crossroads: continue with a manual process that consumed a lot of time and resources, or find a technological solution that would allow it to automate the process without compromising accuracy and efficiency. The need for a scalable solution that could handle a massive volume of tickets was imperative.
Proposed Solution
At Honne Services we help our client by designing and implementing an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solution in the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The goal was to automate the ticket verification process, minimizing manual intervention and speeding up response time to customers.
The automated process begins with ingesting the ticket information through an API Gateway using HTTP REST. Customers send their purchase tickets as PDF files or images, which are stored in an Amazon S3 Bucket. This cloud storage ensures that files are secure and accessible for further processing.
Once the file is stored, a process is automatically triggered in AWS Lambda, a service that allows code to be executed in response to events. Lambda uses Amazon Textract, a service that uses Machine Learning to automatically extract text and data from scanned documents. Textract analyzes the ticket and extracts relevant information, such as the purchase date, store, and items purchased.
The information extracted by Textract is then organized and processed by another set of Lambda functions, which are responsible for structuring the data into a suitable JSON format. This JSON is stored in a DynamoDB database, a highly scalable NoSQL database that allows you to quickly query information when necessary.
Benefits
The implementation of this technological solution, led by Honne Services, radically transformed the ticket verification process and cashback redemption. Now, the financial institution can process up to one million tickets per month, a volume that would have been impossible to handle manually. This increase in processing capacity has not only improved operational efficiency, but has also allowed the company to serve its customers more quickly and accurately.
The benefits of this automation are multiple. The company has managed to significantly reduce the costs associated with manual ticket verification, allowing staff to focus on higher value-added tasks. Additionally, the response time for cashback redemption has been drastically reduced, improving the customer experience and increasing customer satisfaction.
By eliminating delays and human errors in ticket verification, the company has strengthened its customers' confidence in the cashback program, contributing to greater loyalty and retention. Automation has also allowed the company to scale its cashback program without worrying about operational bottlenecks, which has been key to its growth and continued success in a highly competitive market.
The solution implemented by Honne Services not only solved the financial institution's operational challenge, but also laid the foundation for future innovations and improvements in its service offering. With our experience in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions, we have demonstrated how technology can transform complex processes into opportunities for growth and continuous improvement.
If your company faces similar challenges or is looking to optimize its operational processes through technology, Honne Services is here to help. Contact us to discover how we can boost your business and take it to the next level, ensuring efficiency, customer satisfaction and a sustainable competitive advantage in the market. Together, we can transform your challenges into successes.