Loyalty is More Than Just Points
Loyalty is customers’ intention to continue doing business with a company, increase their spending, or say good things about it, or refrain from saying bad things. A Loyalty program may start with rewards in the form of points, cash back, billing, discounts, or special offers, but retaining customers after the reward is the most important factor. Key success factors of an effective Loyalty program revolve around an Integrated Experience, Customer Segmentation, Anticipating Customer Pain Points, and Minimizing Customer Effort in Service Interactions.
Market Realities
Customers have more choice than ever today, therefore customer satisfaction is essential to continued growth. Most Loyalty programs are reactive, offering no differentiation how different customers are rewarded, or trying to persuade a customer not to leave after an unsatisfactory experience. Customer retention has a big impact on profits. Having the right Loyalty program can be an effective weapon in increasing customer satisfaction and reducing churn.
A Comprehensive Approach
Integrating the Loyalty program into the full customer experience can have a bigger Impact on customer retention than an across the board points/rewards system. 33% of rewards go unredeemed and therefore have no impact (Source: Colloquy Customer Loyalty Census).
Customer segmentation is essential to achieving program goals. Validated learning lets you quickly refine and evolve your approach. Test your reward model on a segment of your customer base to determine if it resonates; or conduct A/B testing by offering different reward models to different customer segments to see which is more popular. To increase customer loyalty, focus on your high value customers. High value customers are not necessarily the ones that interact with your brand the most frequently. A high value customer is calculated from the perspective of consistent engagement, conversions, and sales across multiple channels. Maximizing the combination of opportunities to convert and increase potential order value, yields your highest value customers.
Anticipating when a customer will run into an issue is science, not guesswork. A Loyalty platform should be driven by an intelligent analytics engine that is capable of correlating data points from multiple sources to provide timely and actionable intelligence. The platform should describe the data with visualizations, predict negative and positive activities such as an impending issue or likelihood to purchase, and prescribe strategic actions.
Customers’ affinity to a brand has more to do with a company’s ability to deliver on their basic promises. Over-promising customers does not build loyalty; reducing their effort or the amount of work they must do to get their problem solved does. By having advance knowledge of impending issues and their mitigating circumstances; or a customer’s propensity for purchasing a targeted product, you can greatly minimize the customer’s effort in their service interactions.
For the Right Price
Loyalty programs tend to be very costly. A SaaS based Loyalty solution removes the cost and maintenance of infrastructure; should allow you to pay as you go further minimizing investment; and should be delivered in a short time frame reducing upfront costs.
The Dante team has the experience and expertise to deliver a seamless, converged Loyalty solution that increases customer retention and revenue growth.
