Executive Summary

When a global beverage company set out to modernize its loyalty program for ~1 million customers, it initially engaged The Big Four consulting firms to scope the transformation.

The proposals came with high cost, long delivery timelines, and a heavy emphasis on strategy decks before any capability would reach the business.

Instead, the company chose to partner with causaLens, delivering the same strategic ambition at approximately 1/4 of the price and around 3× faster than The Big Four proposals. More importantly, the outcome was not a roadmap or pilot, but a production-grade intelligence engine adopted by internal teams immediately.

This decision transformed the loyalty program from a manual, intuition-driven process into a scalable, data-driven commercial capability operating across 10 countries and supporting ~1M customers.

Client Overview

This beverage company is the largest franchise bottler of soft drink products in the world by sales volume.

The company manages complex commercial operations across multiple regions, including a loyalty program. This is critical for engaging hundreds of thousands of customers through targeted challenges and incentives. To maintain market leadership, the company needed to evolve its loyalty operations from a manual, local effort into a scalable, intelligent global standard capable of delivering consistent value across diverse markets.

The Challenge - Manual Processes and Zero Visibility

Despite the strategic importance of the loyalty program, the operational reality behind the scenes was inefficient and unscalable:

• Manual and Repetitive Design: Marketing teams spent excessive time manually digging through "zero friendly" SAP data just to find basic client volume history. Simple tasks, like identifying clients buying 5 cases to target them for a 7-case challenge, required laborious research.
• Lack of Optimization: Decisions were driven by intuition rather than data. There was no recommendation engine to suggest optimal challenge mechanics, and teams had no visibility into which historical strategies actually worked.
• Inability to Predict ROI: Marketing launched campaigns without knowing the expected uplift or return on investment, making financial planning a guessing game.
• Operational Bottlenecks: Monthly planning cycles required a one-month lead time just to brief the salesforce. Coordination between digital, category, and marketing teams was slow, hindering the agility needed to scale across 10 countries.

The company needed a solution that could operationalize data insights immediately, rather than just providing another dashboard.

The Solution - Intelligent Loyalty Engine

Building on a successful track record of fast, high-quality delivery, causaLens implemented a solution that outmaneuvered other system integrators by offering speed, agility, and modern AI capabilities:

• Automated Opportunity Selection: A dedicated tool allows marketing teams to instantly select opportunities filtered by volume, product, brand, and region, eliminating manual SAP scraping.
• Smart Recommendation Engine: The system suggests optimal challenge mechanics based on rigorous analysis of historical performance, ensuring every campaign is built on what actually works.
• Predictive ROI Modeling: Before a challenge is launched, the platform provides clear predictions for expected ROI and sales uplift, enabling evidence-based decision-making.
• Scalable Framework: The solution established a repeatable, standardized methodology designed to scale from Mexico to 10 other countries and ~40 users, ensuring consistent execution globally.

Future Impact

The deployment of the causaLens solution has fundamentally shifted the company’s approach to loyalty management, turning a cost center into a strategic asset. Compared with initial proposals from the Big Four, the solution was delivered at approximately 1/4 of the cost and around 3x faster, accelerating value realization while reducing transformation risk:

• Operational Efficiency: Manual data research has been eliminated, significantly shortening monthly planning cycles and reducing coordination overhead between departments.
• Data-Driven Precision: Challenge design has shifted from guesswork to science. Teams now utilize quantified predictions to target the right customers with the right incentives.
• Strategic Scalability: KOF now possesses a "smart engine" template validated in Mexico that is ready for rapid rollout across all markets, fostering cross-market learning.
• Commercial Effectiveness: By delivering better-targeted challenges to ~1M customers, the salesforce is more engaged, and incentive spend is optimized for maximum impact.

As a result, the organization now benefits from a more efficient, data-driven, and scalable approach to loyalty management that supports ongoing commercial success.