BrightStar Department Stores - Digital Transformation Overview

1. Introduction: Your New Assignment

As a Business Analyst at a major consultancy company, you will work on a modernisation project for BrightStar Department Stores, a major retail chain. This project focuses on challenges that businesses face in the digital age.
You should read the whole document before working on the coursework. If you have any questions, write them down and contact the product owner to clarify this brief.

2. Client Background: BrightStar Department Stores

BrightStar customers purchase food and products in stores and online. For years, the company has relied on traditional methods for its operations, including the “Star Rewards” loyalty program.

3. The Main Business Challenge

BrightStar needs digital transformation for two main reasons:

• Outdated Customer Loyalty Program (“Star Rewards”): The current program, which uses physical cards and paper statements sent in the post, fails to attract younger customers, reduces loyalty, has outdated promo offers, and suffers from operational inefficiency.
• Operational Bottlenecks & Customer Friction: Beyond loyalty, the business experiences significant friction points in core in-store operations. For instance, the returns and exchanges process is a significant source of customer frustration and staff inefficiency, impacting overall customer satisfaction.

These challenges collectively hinder BrightStar’s ability to compete effectively and retain its customer base in an increasingly digital and demanding retail landscape.

4. BrightStar’s Vision

BrightStar aims to become a digitally-driven retailer that offers seamless, personalised, and efficient experiences across all customer touchpoints. Their vision for the transformation includes:

• Boosting customer loyalty with modern digital engagement.
• Gaining deeper, real-time insights into customer behaviour.
• Streamlining internal operations to improve efficiency and reduce friction.
• Improve the overall customer experience and regain a competitive edge.

5. Your Role in the Transformation

As a Business Analyst on a major consultancy company project, you will bridge the gap between BrightStar’s business needs and the technology solutions required to achieve their vision. You will analyse problems, define requirements, map out processes, propose solutions, and support implementation. This case study will help you learn and apply BA methods through research and self-study.

6. Initial Project Insights & Key Areas of Focus for the retail business

Initial customer feedback about the ‘Star Rewards’ loyalty program has highlighted the challenges at BrightStar. You can use this information as a starting point for your coursework tasks.

6.1 Understanding the Current Customer Loyalty Landscape

Initial customer feedback regarding the “Star Rewards” loyalty program highlights several pain points that you will need to delve deeper into:

• “I always forget my physical card. I wish it were on my phone like everything else.”,
• “I get my points, but don’t know how many I have or what I can get with them. The statements I get in the post are always old.”
• “The offers I get are usually for things I never buy. Why can’t they send me discounts on my favourite bakery items?”
• “Signing up took ages. So much paperwork and a long wait at the service desk.”
• “I earned enough points for a reward, but when I tried to redeem it, the cashier didn’t know how, and I had to go to the customer service desk. Too much hassle!”
• “My friend uses a different store app, and she gets instant discounts and birthday offers. BrightStar feels old-fashioned.”
• “Sometimes, my points don’t appear immediately after a purchase, so I have to call the helpline, but even then, I am always waiting or on hold. Now I shop at Sainsbury’s because everything works.”
• “I just want to know my balance instantly when shopping, not wait for a letter in the mail.”

To help your analysis, the current ‘Star Rewards’ program is largely manual: customers get physical cards, forms are processed manually, points update weekly from batch systems, and redemption often needs a customer service desk visit.

Your challenge will be to analyse these insights to identify core themes, understand customer pain points, and identify key stakeholders involved in improving the loyalty program.

6.2 Emerging Operational Challenge: Inefficient Returns & Exchanges Process

As the loyalty program modernisation progresses, another critical operational challenge has emerged within BrightStar: their in-store returns and exchanges process is inadequate. This process is a significant source of customer frustration and operational strain.

Feedback from within the organisation:

• “Customers often wait in long lines at the customer service desk for returns, especially during peak shopping hours or after-sales events.”, Store Manager
• “Staff members sometimes interpret or apply return rules (e.g., for items without receipts and damaged packaging) inconsistently across different stores or shifts, leading to confusion and disputes.”, Assistant Manager
• “Refunds for online purchases returned in-store usually take several days to appear in the customer’s account, leading to frustration and follow-up calls.”, Customer Service Coordinator
• “The process still involves a significant amount of manual data entry and physical paperwork, which contributes to errors and slows down transactions.”, Cashier
• “Once an item has been dropped off, customers have no easy way to track the status of their return or refund.”, Finance Manager

While this training primarily focused on modernising the Star Rewards loyalty program, BrightStar also faces critical operational challenges with the in-store returns and exchanges process. You will analyse its ‘as-is’ state, define requirements for a streamlined solution, and propose how BrightStar can improve this critical customer touchpoint. This area offers significant future opportunities, but for this foundational training, your main focus remains on the loyalty program, serving as an example for later project phases.

7. Product Owner Insights

Following initial discussions with the Product Owner, the following key insights were gathered, giving more context for the project:

7.1. “Star Rewards” Loyalty Program

The ‘Star Rewards’ program operates on an outdated, batch-processed mainframe, lacking real-time updates and personalised offers. Customer data is inconsistent, manually entered, and not easily used for insights.

• “I am really worried about the Sainsbury’s Nectar. We do not seem to be on the same level as their dynamic and engaging digital experience.”, Product Managing Director
• “I want to see more users downloading the app and actively buying through it”, Marketing Managing Director
• “We want to implement a digital solution asap. We need to see results within the next 12 months”, CTO

7.2. Inefficient Returns & Exchanges Process

While the immediate project focuses on loyalty, preliminary discussions have identified key insights regarding the inefficient returns & exchanges process, a focus for BrightStar in future phases. Formal documentation is minimal, so we need help mapping the “as-is” process.

• “After a marketing or sales campaign, we always have a spike in returns of the product. The volume is sometimes unmanageable and costly”, Operations Manager
• “The return process is very manual, using Oracle Financials for a refund from the POS. This always causes delays and inventory inconsistencies.”, Store Manager
• “We must ensure the product is returned within 28 days of purchase. And the receipt must be legible and available.”, Legal Manager
• “I want returned items to be resold. Otherwise, it’s a big loss”, Operations Manager
• “When refunds don’t go to the original payment method, it causes delays for online or in-store returns. We spend hours trying to match up payments and refunds with the correct customer”, Finance Manager

Your journey as a Business Analyst begins now

You have the exciting challenge of coming up with solutions to transform BrightStar’s retail business and prepare it for the digital age. Now that you have read the brief and identified the main problem, it’s up to you to discover, define, and design solutions!

The BrightStar case study allows students to complete all the learning objectives and coursework independently—the sprints detail what is expected to be delivered each week.