Sharing an ideal and a joint effort to reach the most vulnerable population, administering benefit bonuses redeemed for goods and services at the multibrand and multiformat retailer.
Cencosud
A Chilean company with regional presence and diversified businesses in the retail sector, including supermarkets, department stores, shopping centers, financial retail, and home improvement, among others.
- A regional market leader
- Multibrand and multiformat retailer with locations throughout Latin America
- In the top 5 supermarkets with the largest share in Colombia
Cencosud is a Chilean business consortium that is one of the largest and most prestigious retail conglomerates in Latin America. The company operates in several South American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Perú, and Colombia. Cencosud’s objective is to become the largest retailer in Latin America and provide the highest quality of service to all of its clients. Its mission is to be the most profitable retailer in the region.
The Company’s objective is to do business in general, including the purchase, sale, consignment, distribution, importing, exporting, representation, commissioning, packaging, bulk-breaking, and commercialization on one’s account or on behalf of someone else of all manner of movable tangible assets.
Since 2019, the company has been working to reinforce its omnichannel strategy based on the understanding that the way to establish relationships is always evolving. Thus, the company is working hard to be at the fore in that change and ensure that it delivers the best sales and services experience to its customers every single time, whether through its physical or virtual stores.
Business Units
The challenge
In its constant search for partners to facilitate the gathering of aid or benefits for the public, the Secretaría Distrital de Integración Social (“District Secretariat of Social Integration”)—an entity of the Capital District of Bogotá that oversees and designs social policies to address the social integration of people, families, and communities (especially those who are in conditions of dire poverty and vulnerability)—established a relationship with Cencosud, one of the largest and most prestigious retail conglomerates in Latin America. Facing this challenge, Cencosud endeavored to find a reliable technology ally to help guarantee a timely purchase experience without increasing its own workload and that of its customers as well as transaction security through an agile and secure redemption mechanism.
An agile and leading technology provider
The need was a given, and Evertec®, taking advantage of its infrastructure, comes in as a technology provider to serve as the bridge in transactions, facilitate purchase experiences through electronic means, and make operational processes more efficient. Thanks to a joint effort and after a few months of project evaluations, Evertec made available to Cencosud Colombia a transaction web portal that permits validation and execution of the information provided by the customer for adequate operation of its program, which consists of benefit bonuses that can be exchanged for goods or services at the Retailer. A fluid communication and collaboration with Evertec enabled the solution to be updated according to market behavior as well as with the customer’s reality, as it was conceived for and aligned with the project’s objective from the start: “to provide effective and secure service and support to those persons who are most vulnerable.”
The result
Confidence in the redemption mechanism. It consolidated the model as one of the most successful, reliable, and accountable models upon the execution of the project that Cencosud commissioned to Evertec. The solution migrated to other projects, representing a notable sales increase for the retail sector. By keeping the business model in sync with customer needs and demands, a commercial relationship of more than a decade is still going strong.
Special Sales Director / Business Sales at Cencosud
“Our experience with Evertec has been more than satisfactory. It has addressed our customers’ new needs in a timely fashion, always adapting to new market demands, correcting, and looking to improve its processes continuously. This has enabled the strengthening, consolidation, and transformation of the model into a traditional payment method both within Cencosud as well as externally, as used by the customers we serve. The implementation of automatic correction mechanisms that came about from Evertec’s initiative has mitigated many errors that commonly arise in similar transactions, to the point where there are practically no flaws in the system. We go through every transaction with confidence and peace of mind because we know that we have a solid product that is hard to match.”