How we work
Our role is to provide expert assistance
There is no 'one size fits all' approach to the loyalty business. Afterall, as you know, people are complex.
The target customer segments are many and very diverse. What drives them can vary substantially.
However, like with any good plan development in a complex arena, we have a base structure or methodology we like to employ.
This is to increase understanding. Also to ensure that nothing is overlooked and hence we jointly increase the probability of success.
We work with you on this. Nothing is completed in isolation. And we work in a structured way.
We bring our experience and expertise, our guidance and insights, to assist you.
But please also understand that nothing is static. The process of refinement and learning and gaining insights never stops. It is a continuum. A virtuous circle.
Customer engagement - a few insights before we begin
Direct connection between experience and loyalty
There is a clear-cut connection between customer experience (CX) and loyalty. This observation is certainly not rocket science.
Without a great experience, there is no path to true loyalty.
It is an essential underpinning element, and no program standing by itself as some sort of silver bullet is going to deliver unless the customer experience is also addressed and delivering against customer expectation.
And the customer is continuously lifting the height of this crossbar. Expectations are increasing and customers are becoming more savvy.
Engagement activity becoming omni-channel
All aspects of engagement across the customer lifecycle and the way companies think about customer experience is becoming increasingly omni-channel in nature.
Enhancing the digital experience has gained equal prominence with - and become inseparable from - the optimisation of human interactions in the physical world. This is by having effective, quality customer engagements anywhere and everywhere they touch your company. Good experiences, hopefully.
By addressing this challenge properly, you are able to shape the way that customers think about, choose, use and endorse the products and services you provide. To induce loyalty. To earn it.
You require an integrated loyalty strategy.
Both loyalty programs and customer experience provide essential elements of building an effective relationship with your customers - amounting to more than a simple transactions flow.
Loyalty programs within your overall customer strategy are an essential building block. They enable effective communication, dialogue, feedback and recognition, and importantly, facilitate the management and measurement of your overall success, or otherwise.
Where do we start?
Best practice is to start at the beginning - funny about that.
What do we want to achieve? What does success look like? - and to have a defined process to get there, with steps that are virtually and serially nested.
It is a structured journey. But we first need to know where we are going. Where or what is our destination?
So we start with your vision and macro customer strategy - your objectives articulated and prioritised.
Then we do some fact finding, qualifying, measurement and analysis. This is an important step as it is a verification and clarity process to ensure that we are on the right track - that we have the correct focus and priorities for the best returns. Recognising that 'we cannot boil the ocean'.
Hence it is also a refinement process. Working out the deliverables that can be achieved and approximately in what timeframes and identifying any critical dependencies and potential interlinks with other management systems.
We both need to truly understand the business you are in and to examine the data, information and insights we already have.
As a first stage, it involves a traditional SWOT analysis where we honestly and truthfully assess where you are positioned and we will also conduct a benchmarking exercise.
How big is our addressable market? What are our growth targets and over what timeframe? How do we think we are going to achieve these?
Treating different customers differently - an audience of one
We need to carefully think about customer segmentation - grouping and profiling and conduct value analysis. And we will need to refine this process over and over as time goes by, as it is the bedrock of Direct Marketing and personalisation - our ability to effectively engage with an audience of one.
What are the attributes of our defined segments? What are the insights you have already? What can we add from our knowledge and experience? We need to spend time on this important step and prioritise and assign value to each segment, as well as think carefully about how we best get to each target segment within the mix. What are their buying behaviours? What are their drivers? How do we best cater to these? Have their past experiences been good or bad? Have we had notable defections and, if so, do we know why?
We need to identify early on whether we have the right tools for an effective and successful program. The old adage applies: 'it is hard to manage what you cannot measure'.
Do we have a robust, hardened core system to run the program? Does it accurately capture all the transaction data we need? Are we able to easily interrogate the database to aid our segmentation and personalisation strategies? Have we got the tools to generate effective customer insight? Can we use it to develop campaigns and to manage them?
Can we measure the results of our various initiatives for effectiveness management and to measure return on investment? Can we conduct appropriate financial analysis and modelling?
Let's design and build a program
We are a very experienced group who can assist greatly in this process. We ask you to refer to the Team section of this website to give you a concise overview of the vast cross sectional experience we have in delivering results.
We will design flexible solutions that have longevity, provide effective insights and measurement capabilities that enable you to remain nimble as the marketplace evolves and where you will need to refine and be able to modify what you do.
It will be customised to meet your specific requirements, based on your objectives and the analysis and research we initially did with you in stage one..
We will apply lean management and lean design principles for effective cost management.
We will cover all requirements, including competitive analysis, benchmarking, costing and financial modelling. We will also work with you to design and develop the most appropriate key performance indices based on our knowledge of industry best practice.
Technology selection and integration
Our deep understanding of enterprise computing - the contemporary digital world - and long history of real life large scale implementations will be part of what we bring that is of substantial value. It is business risk reduction. We help you avoid pitfalls when implementing new systems and managing integration.
This is especially where there are multiple program partner companies who are each involved in exchanging customer and transactional data collected via multiple channels over a diverse range of underlying technologies.
We bring it together into a single scheme - one of the primary advantages and selling points of a coalition program.
Consumers who are members have a higher earning velocity and so get to 'fly free faster'. Or get other valuable rewards, or use their points or miles to real-time pay or part-pay and mix with variety of other types of payment for anything, anywhere credit or debit cards are accepted.
We will utilise digital wallets with apps directly connected to payment switches.
And we help you select the right technology partners. We are independent and agnostic when it comes to selection. Unlike many other loyalty consulting firms, we have no systems of our own to push. But we recommend SaaS based systems where ever possible.
We can identify the best designers and builders of sophisticated, multi-faceted transaction web-sites and mobile apps that have large amounts of content within them, which have to be fast, highly functional and easily navigable.
Loyalty programs - both an art and a discipline
A successful loyalty program operation requires both art and operational discipline.
The art is ensuring that the program really connects with customers and the relationships are leveraged one-on-one to build true loyalty; to have them keep on coming back, and be advocates that recommend your company to others.
But even this so-called 'art' is a discipline. It relies largely on data and the insights they generate. And good marketing analysis and customer feedback. We also need talented marketing people: who are innovative, numerate, visionary and loaded with passion and drive.
The operational discipline is the less sexy side of the business but truly essential to its success. It is the analytics, the algorithms, the financials, the systems and processes that facilitate production of accurate performance measurement tools so that we can see where we are going and what we have achieved. To see if we are profitable and/or meeting other KPIs. They are also the enablers to deliver exceptional customer service. And the enablers for the talented marketing personnel to practice their so-called 'art'.
As we stated at the beginning of this section: the process of refinement and gaining better insights never stops, as the marketplace is extremely dynamic. It evolves at a rapid pace, and this pace seems to be increasing. You cannot afford to stand still. If you do, in this day and age, you have a relatively high risk of dying.
That is why successful companies must continually evolve their relationship marketing strategies. They must ensure that they can be nimble and fast on their feet - able to pivot if necessary - to be able to make quick decisions based on accurate, timely data, turned into useful information.
They must know their customers. They must detect change and so 'stay ahead of the curve'.
We repeat: It is a marketing continuum. A virtuous circle in what has become a digital driven world.
It is stimulating. It can be enjoyable. It can be fun.
Done properly, it can deliver substantial benefits. And that is what we are here for.
