Cinépolis achieves 300% increase in net new loyalty customers and boosts revenue with Identity

In just over 50 years Cinépolis has grown into one of the largest movie theater chains in the world; entertaining customers from over 800 locations throughout the globe.

Their popular, eight-million-member Club Cinépolis loyalty program is a key initiative in their success, allowing them to offer benefits to valued customers such as free ticket deals and discounts on drinks and snacks.

“We are customer-centric, and our loyalty program, Club Cinépolis, is the core of the company. Our customers spend their valuable time with us. We want to reward them and deliver value in exchange,” explains Armando Herrera Godinez, Cinépolis’s Head of Product.

The need for a modern customer experience

Despite the enduring popularity of Club Cinépolis, the program had started to feel dated. Account registration relied on error-prone manual processes performed by in-theater staff. Duplicate and fraudulent accounts were nearly impossible to identify. There was also no ability to gather meaningful user data or to offer personalized experiences for individual members.

Cinépolis recognized that in order to maintain customer loyalty, and scale the program to match the growth of the organization, they needed to modernize. This meant a complete digital transformation that would drive user engagement, improve customer experience, and move Club Cinépolis’s clunky physical registration processes into the self-service digital realm.

Digitizing the entire process would make Identity central to user experience, security, and scalability. “Cinépolis was born in an analog era with physical processes that needed to be migrated to a digital world,” Herrera says “ Digitizing membership and Identity not only lets us create better customer experiences, it lets us understand our users better to continuously improve.”

Finding the right solution

Cinépolis started this journey with the following goals in mind: to enhance their customer experience, eliminate manual registration processes, and significantly improve the quality and use of member data.

Understanding the importance of Identity as the connective tissue for achieving their aims, Cinépolis unsuccessfully tried to build their own solution and then deploy a third-party vendor. After months of work, requiring significant developer time, implementation issues, and significant costs, they had to go back to the drawing board.

At this point, they turned to TEC360 and their team of trusted advisors for help. Supported by the experts at TEC360 and influenced by Okta’s continued leadership in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Cinépolis found that Okta Customer Identity Cloud (CIC) offered a one-stop shop to solve their Identity needs.

Driving a 300% increase in net new loyal customers

Building a modern loyalty program on Okta meant simplifying the enrollment process and leveraging Identity data in innovative ways. New users can now self-register for Club Cinépolis on their mobile devices, desktops, and kiosks within each cinema. Current users can effortlessly sign in and easily sync their existing accounts, eliminating the orphan accounts.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) validates phone numbers and email addresses, while Progressive Profiling enables Cinépolis to gather minimal personal information upfront and then use Actions to automatically prompt users to provide additional information when necessary. With clean, reliable data the team has been able to deliver targeted, personalized experiences to loyalty members, ranging from weekly challenges to rewards. This has led to a direct increase in average ticket revenue per loyalty member.

“Our loyalty clients are the most valuable asset in the company,” Herrera says. “Knowing more about our customers lets Cinépolis personalize experiences. Progressive Profiling enable data capture to gain insight for sending the right offer to the right person at the right time.”

This simplification of enrollment and focus on data has allowed Cinépolis to add 1.3 million new members in just three months., for a 300% increase in net new loyal customers compared to the physical process. Before digitization, it took a full year for Cinépolis to reach similar numbers using a number of methods and adding a number of complexities. Now, as a result of the new process, 100% of digital users’ emails and phone numbers have been validated.

Decreasing fake accounts and fraudulent activity by 16%

Loyalty programs are attractive targets for bad actors, fraudsters and the like. “At the end of the day, safety comes first,” says Herrera. “The migration of this valuable data could be very dangerous. We need to care for the integrity of member profiles and block malicious actors while providing a frictionless user experience.”

With Customer Identity Cloud, Cinepolis achieved a 16% reduction in fraudulent transactions that stemmed from both fake accounts and the unauthorized use of rewards from legitimate accounts. Only verified users can now redeem rewards and threat actors can no longer exploit program shortcomings.

Solutions such as Attack Protection, which consists of Bot detection, Brute-force Protection, and Suspicious IP Throttling, provided the Cinépolis team with out-of-the-box capabilities to defend against credential stuffing attacks and prevent account takeovers. “The implementation of these features was quite easy,” Juan Velez Ballestreros, Head of Technology, Architecture, and Engineering says, “It was only one click in the Okta console. Thanks to Okta, we believe we have better control over fraud and suspicious activity,”

Reducing time-to-market by 80% and saving costs

With Customer Identity Cloud, the Cinépolis team gained access to the scale and efficiency their international growth required.

“With our growth, we needed tools and partners that could support and scale with us,” shares Herrera. “We have always done a great job in promoting Club Cinépolis; with Okta, our systems can handle the volume we aim to drive to the program.”

Time-to-market was an early indicator of Okta supporting this scale. Cinépolis were able to build a solution in two to three months, where their unsuccessful in-house solution had taken 18 months. This was achieved by a team of six developers, where the previous implementation required 20. Overall, Cinépolis estimates an 80% reduction in time-to-market through partnering with Okta.

The implementation of self-service account registration enabled further efficiencies. It refocused the work of in-theater employees away from physical account signups. It also reduced the need to issue and replace physical membership cards. Combined with the reduction in fraud and the ability to reduce and better target advertising spend, this contributed to a 35% cost decrease.

Up next in the Cinépolis Identity journey

The digitization of Club Cinépolis is creating more opportunities for the company to engage, and continue offering greater value for customers around the globe. Cinépolis has used Customer Identity Cloud to reinforce their relationship with their loyalty members. They can now use that momentum to take their customer experience to the next level.

“We need to evolve the program based on what our customers want and need,” explains Herrera. “Whether it’s converting those resistant to digital, implementing passwordless login with passkey, or integrating the loyalty program in our international channels, we are using Identity to make it easy for our customers to continue the loyalty relationship.”

About Customer

Cinépolis is a Mexico-based, global company that is the world’s fourth largest movie theater chain. Founded in Mexico in 1971, today Cinépolis operates 820+ cinemas, across 17 countries worldwide, run by a workforce of more than 42,000 people. Around the globe, Cinépolis is driven by its mission to provide guests with the best overall experience in film entertainment.

About Partner

TEC360, an Okta Apex Partner since 2017, provides innovative security cloud solutions for large and medium enterprises in Mexico and Latin America in order to help businesses become more secure, productive and agile.