Working with a network of more than 2,100 holiday, travel and leisure providers across Europe, Loyaltybuild provides its clients with the opportunity to offer heavily discounted holiday packages to their customers as part of a loyalty programme. Loyaltybuild clients get a website branded in their name and call centre support. Loyaltybuild also provides customisable validation services that enable client customers to use their loyalty cards or voucher numbers to claim their holiday.
As well as their online booking systems, the company operates a call centre in Ennis and outsourced call centres in the Nordics, the UK and Switzerland. "Based on the nature of what we do, IT is pretty much key to the business," explains John Egan, IT Manager at Loyaltybuild.
Loyaltybuild's IT team has eight full-time employees. This in-house development team built the web application that handles the booking and validation processes and the company continues to support and add new features to the application.
The firm's public-facing online systems are housed in a BT-owned data centre in Dublin. Outsourcing the IT support element adds resilience to the system, says Egan.
Loyaltybuild is constantly updating its IT infrastructure. In the past year, the company migrated its contact centre telephony system to a Cisco-based VoIP system, implemented a business intelligence solution, achieved PCI compliance, and put a disaster recovery solution in place.
Internet telephony
To 'future-proof' its old analogue telephone system, Loyaltybuild decided to migrate to a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony system from Cisco.
"Our analogue system had all the features, but the VoIP system enables us to look at things like working from home and being able to add other mediums of communication to the phone system," says Egan.
Loyaltybuild chose a Cisco UCC Express solution, based on the size of their call centre, functionality, and the ease of integrating the new system with pre-existing Cisco equipment on their network.
"We had already upgraded a lot of our network, in terms of switches and firewalls, over to Cisco. So, choosing Cisco as our VoIP backbone meant that we had a homogeneous network environment from telephony through to data networks. It all fitted nicely into place," says Egan.
Business intelligence
In an effort to reduce the amount of time it took to create reports and make better use of the information in their company databases, Loyaltybuild implemented a Cognos business intelligence system earlier this year. Cognos simplifies report creation, giving users more power to create reports and generate ad hoc queries independently.
"There is an ongoing need in our business to get reporting around various areas like availability and bookings. What would have traditionally happened would be that one of the developers would have built a report using ColdFusion. That's fine, but every time there was a new request for a report, there'd be a hit on the IT resources in terms of somebody actually having to write it," explains Egan.
"It wasn't just IT staff spending large amounts of time on report-creation. Prior to the new system's arrival, between 10 and 15 non-IT staff would spend all day Monday collating data for reports. Now they can run the report within their first ten minutes on a Monday morning. They send it out and they've freed up their work day," says Egan.
This freedom allows Loyaltybuild employees to ask more penetrating questions about the data they are gathering, rather than spending their time simply trying to gather the data, says Egan.
Disaster recovery
With call centres being so important to its business, Loyaltybuild recently implemented a disaster recovery solution to ensure that it can maintain business activities should disaster strike.
"It's essential that our call centre is up and running - always. So if for whatever reason we can't get into our building, our call centre agents need to have the ability to take bookings in a different location," says Egan.
Loyaltybuild used Ennis-based LinkResQ's work area recovery solution (WARS) to develop a plan. "In the end, we asked ourselves 'what do we really need?' and found that we really need PCs with internet access and the ability to redirect our phone lines," says Egan.
This year, the company added some redundant servers to that list, so that they can restore internal systems quickly in the event of disaster.
Egan advises SMEs to look at outsourcing elements of their IT set-up, to cut costs and add resilience to their overall IT system. Outsourcing can also simplify disaster recovery strategies since outsourced data and systems - in Loyaltybuild's case, its booking engine - are not housed in company HQ.
Loyaltybuild also makes use of virtualised servers. "We've tried as hard as possible to use as little hardware as possible. We use VMWare for a lot of our servers and a lot of our servers here are virtualised, so that makes life a lot easier," says Egan.
PCI compliance
Earlier this year, Loyaltybuild achieved Payment Card Industry compliance - a standard created by the main credit card vendors worldwide to help e-merchants ensure high levels of security and protection over customer financial details.
The standard covers everything from having antivirus software and intrusion protection systems installed, to secure practices around applications and best practice around documentation and operational procedures.
"It's an exhaustive and stringent standard, but one worth achieving," says Egan. "It was a major undertaking but it brings huge benefits in terms of trust from your customers, who know that you have a certain standard of security protecting their credit card information. It also improves the general security around the company because it touches on so many different areas."
Loyaltybuild has made substantial investments in IT solutions, but there are more improvements in the pipeline. The company is looking at the possibility of migrating its websites to a new platform (from ColdFusion to RIA) to improve end-user experience, increase modularity and enable the in-house development team to add a greater variety of features going forward.
*Do you know of an SME with an eBusiness success story to tell? If so, please send us an email with your details and a brief outline of the reasons why you think it would make a good case study candidate.