Voices: the CMB Blog

Originally Published in Loyalty Management Magazine

Recent articles on the “new economics” of loyalty programs and the choices program managers face may be important to read, but many of them leave me bewildered. These articles warn that in the new loyalty environment, credit card companies will play an increasingly disruptive force as members seek reward currency that offers them more options. They encourage executives to restructure the currency to ensure its dominance, and some authors argue that cash-strapped firms should divest their loyalty programs to generate revenue for the company. 

I agree that if you manage a mature program, with a point or mile-based currency, you need to ensure your program offers a relevant currency with a competitive “earn and burn” structure. This currency and the associated promotions are table-stakes; a requirement for both acquiring and retaining valuable customers. But ask yourself this question: is a loyalty program where your primary focus is on the currency (and its economics) really supporting your customer loyalty strategy? 

In our opinion, real loyalty—the kind that spurs evangelization, incremental trips/purchases, paying a price premium—doesn’t come from delivering points. Your customers don’t buy from you because you give them points. They choose to buy from you because of the distinct value provided by your brand. The key problem with enhanced focus on program currency is that points and miles don’t reflect your brand or its unique value proposition—and won’t engage your passionate customers. 

So how can you ensure that your loyalty program IS supporting your loyalty strategy? 

Relevant communications: Reflect your knowledge of your members’ behavior and preferences in your program communications. I fly out of Boston: why does American Airlines regularly send me promotions on flights out of Chicago? 

Build out ‘soft benefits’ that reflect the brand: Consider why your loyal customers are passionate about your brand—why they choose to spend money with you and not your competitors—and incorporate supporting elements into your program. You can ramp up these “connective tissue” benefits as customer value increases. 

Consider ‘unpublished’ surprise and delights: Instead of revamping the loyalty program and listing all benefits on the web site, invest in delivering valuable customers an item they’d value on a one-time basis. The benefits are clear: you create good will with your most valuable customers. You’re also not raising the bar, adding to the arms race or increasing expectations. And, in today’s connected world, some of these “private gestures” will support positive comments on social-media channels. 

A few brands whose published loyalty programs reflect their brand value and underscore their unique selling proposition:

 

One hotel chain that excels at the special touches is Kimpton Hotels. The small boutique chain’s unique, fun, and socially conscious brand promise infuses everything, from their rooms to their website, to their loyalty program—InTouch, and their elite loyalty program Inner Circle. Their InTouch program offers traditional perks like free nights, but the preferences of loyalty members also get recognized—the hotels customize amenities (like pillow, newspaper, mini-bar) based on guests’ stated preferences. The rewards are more valuable for the Inner Circle members—those who stay 15 times within a calendar year—they include direct access to the CEO along with the more typical complimentary upgrades. 

 

While hotels have multiple touch-points for sharing their brand with their guests, retail stores can face more of a challenge. But Neimen Marcus’ five tier InCircle program clearly demonstrates an understanding of why loyalty program members choose to shop with them. The program’s benefits reflect their unique brand proposition and reflect the store’s deep understanding of their target customer —affluent shoppers who value luxury and a high-end shopping experience. Neimen’s rewards include perk cards which can be used for dozens of services including alterations, in store dining, monogramming and shoe repair. Rewards highlight exclusivity as well as the more traditional point based rewards. 

 

With truly vast amounts of data, Amazon could be content with offering suggestions based on previously purchased or viewed items—it’s no small thing to show your customers you know what interests them. But Amazon’s rewards program goes beyond the data warehouse, and while Amazon Prime isn’t free, the free or reduced shipping, and access to content, the Kindle lending library, where Kindle owners can borrow and read books for free, are powerful reminders of the value of the brand and strong motivators to encourage frequent shoppers to return again and again.

Judy is VP of CMB's Travel & Entertainment practice and loves collaborating with clients on driving customer loyalty.  She's the mom of two teens and the wife of an oyster farmer. Follow Judy on Twitter at @Judy_LC

Originally published on Loyalty 360

I love New Year’s Resolutions!  Every December, I enjoy reflecting on what I’ve learned in the last 12 months, and set goals to grow professionally and personally.  On my list again this year, is studying opportunities to drive customer engagement—understanding how companies in the travel and hospitality industries can use new techniques and technologies to drive loyalty and ultimately profits.Every two years, Marketing Science Institute (MSI), a think-tank bridging academic theory and business practice, reaches out to thought leaders to set its priorities for upcoming research and conferences.  MSI’s “Priority Topic” list reflects marketing’s key challenges and opportunities (see the full list here). Topics include: Big Data; insight into people as consumers; rethinking the journey to purchase (and beyond); and mobile’s impact on how people live their lives. 

If you were to improve your organization’s effectiveness in any of these areas, chances are good you will increase your customer’s engagement and loyalty.  My “2013 professional resolution” is to share learnings about each of these Priority Topics.

Today, let’s tackle Big Data:  leveraging the customer and market information available to drive business results.  Although the topic of Big Data is just that— “Big,” the reality is when you break it down into small steps you can begin to drive customer engagement with data you already have on hand.

Big Data: The promise and the pitfalls

As computers and cell phones play an increasingly important role in consumers’ daily activities, mountains of data are collected and stored by travel and hospitality companies.  From customer transactional (e.g., bookings, loyalty program redemptions, web site visits, call center logs) to interactional data (e.g., posts on Facebook) and observational data (e.g., networked sensors in cellphones or cars), the amount of data available for analysis is immense and expanding daily.    

When it comes down to it, Big Data is useful only as we are able to glean useful business intelligence from all this data.  The true value of Big Data (or any data for that matter) is not in the bits and bytes but in using the knowledge gained to help you make better decisions—to reduce the chances of making a bad decision and to help you “sleep better at night.”  Companies can leverage big data in a number of ways including product and service development, process improvements, and revenue management.

Some companies who’ve found success with Big Data engagements (outside of travel and hospitality) include:

• Amazon.com, eBay, and Google continuously test factors—from where to place buttons on a Web page to the sequence of content displayed—to determine what will increase sales and user engagement. 

• Capital One continues to refine its methods for segmenting credit card customers and for tailoring products to individual risk profiles. According to Nigel Morris, one of Capital One’s cofounders, the company’s multifunctional teams of financial analysts, IT specialists, and marketers conduct more than 65,000 tests each year, experimenting with combinations of market segments and new products.

• The online grocer Fresh Direct adjusts prices and promotions daily (or even more frequently) based on data feeds from online transactions, visits by consumers to its website, and customer service interactions. 

The pitfalls: 

Quantum physics might be easier to explain than Big Data and brain surgery might be easier to do!  Not only do you need to conceptualize the plan, structure the data, acquire the software and/or analysis tools but then you need to do the analysis.  This is hard to get your head around! 

Big Data exercises to predict customer behavior have been met with limited success.  Netflix offered a $1 Million prize to the firm that could improve its movie selection algorithm by just 10%.  Three years later, a group managed to create a model using available data however the formula was too complicated for Netflix to implement.   If you haven’t read it yet take a few minutes to check out this HBR post that talks about the challenge of modeling consumer behavior: Big Data Hype (and reality).

Big Data: Baby steps

Here are some practical ideas for you to begin to look to incorporate some ‘Big Data’ activities into your 2013 plans:

• Link financial data to your customer satisfaction.  Understand the monetary value (in the short and long-term) of a satisfied guest to make informed decisions on investments and initiatives. 

• Build bridges between different data sources.  First, use the same categories to code responses in your customer satisfaction study, social media analytics and your call center. Second, ensure a person is tagged with the same identifier in all data sources so you can look at a customer’s responses across the silos of your organization. 

• What? So What? Now what?  Start your quest for decision-support with the end in mind.  Get agreement on the “Essential Question” you are looking to address, and identify the supporting information (from all relevant sources) you need to support your recommendations.  Make sure your recommendations answer the question:  Now what action should I take? 

We see a bright future for travel clients in using Big Data for building engagement and loyalty.  Develop a plan to answer your Essential Questions and, then you will be in a better position to practically analyze the right data from the right data sources – applying a laser-like focus on the problem you are trying to solve. 

How will you use Big Data (or any data for that matter) to drive customer engagement and loyalty in 2013?

Judy is VP of CMB's Travel & Entertainment practice and loves collaborating with clients on driving customer loyalty.  She's the mom of two teens and the wife of an oyster farmer. Follow Judy on Twitter at @Judy_LC

A version of this post was published in Loyalty 360's Loyalty Management Magazine

My colleagues can tell you that although we're well into fall in New England, I still love the garden as loyalty program metaphor. That's because loyalty programs, like gardens, are living entities that require ongoing monitoring and periodic refinements to ensure they grow stronger, continue to operate at peak performance, and deliver the results you need for your business. Here are the four steps to getting your program ready to support growth:Step 1:  Review your goals and the (competitive) landscape

Before you tackle the issue of “what” and “how much” to offer to members to incent their behavior, take time to review:

Desired behaviors:  Are you trying to encourage members to visit more frequently?  Spend a bit more?  Advocate to friends and family?
Customer’s needs:  What goals are your members trying to realize?  What activities are they passionate about?
Brand alignment:  How well does your program reflect the unique selling point or values of your brands? Where are the misalignments? 
Program goals:  What key metrics do you measure to report on program success: member acquisition or retention, e.g. the percent of customers who redeem?
Competitive activity:  What outcomes are these programs focused on?  How differentiated is your program from theirs? 

Determining which, and how many, rewards to give your customers, requires careful consideration of multiple factors. Before you proceed down a “program optimization” path—test the soil.  It’s impossible to build a successful garden if you’ve chosen the wrong plants or haven’t added the nutrients your soil needs to support them.    

Step 2:  Focus

“If you persist in trying to be all things to all people, you will fail. The alternative, then, is to be something important to a few people.” – Seth Godin, in We Are All Weird

The focus of your program may be on high-value members and that’s okay.  Today’s high value customers are fairly easy to identify; they’re the ones who buy higher margin products, visit often, and spend in multiple departments and categories.  But concentrating solely on these customers means that you may be missing an opportunity to lay the foundation for future success.  Consider identifying customers who have high value potential (via predictive modeling) and nurture those relationships as well.  In addition, you may find, upon reviewing your goals and objectives, there are certain other segments of customers that matter as well – and for whom you need to focus activities and attention.  For example:

• Caesars Entertainment’s re-launched its Total Rewards program to celebrate its position as the country’s leading entertainment loyalty program.  The new program offers additional offerings and experiences designed to appeal to Entertainment Seekers (in addition to the core avid gamer); their relaunch included concerts by Cee Lo Green, Mariah Carey, P.Diddy and Gavin DeGraw. 

• Best Buy gave select members of its Reward Zone loyalty program a ‘surprise and delight’ reward, a ticket to the Twilight premier.  Sales remain the driving force behind their points-based loyalty system, but in surprise-and-delight programs, marketers can choose consumers who might be major spenders but also because they're passionate or the kind of people who drive incremental buzz online. They’re using this approach to build greater engagement among high-value customers and create more PR-worthy and effective programs in a crowded loyalty space.

Bottomline: focus on the people that are aligned with what you are trying to do. 

Step 3:  Differentiate and innovate

Colloquy’s report on the state of the loyalty industry finds the average US household has 18 loyalty program memberships.  Eighteen! 

If your program is purely a frequency-based program, differentiation isn’t your goal.  However, dialing up program innovation to differentiate from competitors may prove valuable if your desire is to create loyalty, drive incremental spending, stronger customer engagement, and additional brand advocacy.

I love home-grown vegetables, and the varieties I pick are those that do well in my garden and that I can’t buy in a store.  Although I love to garden – if the only product I could grow was one that I could easily buy, I may reconsider the time I was willing to invest.  My pride in this activity would decrease and I’d tell fewer people about my garden. 

For the members you’ve decided to focus on, differentiate your program from competitors.  Give your members a reason to return— pride in their association with you and something to talk about!

Step 4:  Optimize program benefits

You’ve reviewed your objectives and the competitive landscape.  You’ve targeted specific members and have embarked on a program to identify innovative ways to differentiate yourself in the marketplace.  What now? 

To justify changes in your program, you’ll need to articulate the incremental value additional benefits will deliver.  You’ll need to do that if the additional benefits require additional investment – or if you are working with franchisors who demand financial justification to justify additional investment! 

Over the last ten years, we’ve worked with industry leading programs to analyze the cost-benefit of program benefits to support program development or refinement.  Here are a few examples where we conducted quantitative research using advanced analytics (like Discrete Choice):

• A leading upscale hotel chain, needed to figure out an on-property benefit it could provide in place of a guaranteed suite upgrade since some the upgrade wasn’t a viable option at some of their hotels.  An alternative was identified and members are given the choice at check-in. 

• As it develops and acquires new brands, this hotel loyalty program needed to identify the right type and level of benefits to offer at to guests at its extended stay hotels – benefits that would be of value to guests who stay, on average, for two weeks at the hotel

• A leading luxury retailer wanted to optimize structure to drive incremental sales and refresh benefits to incorporate more brand-relevant experiential elements for the refresh of its flagship shopper loyalty program

Discrete choice is a great tool for loyalty program optimization because it allows us to:

1. Optimize programs based on client’s goals:  By examining member interest in thousands of alternative benefit packages – and calculating the cost of providing those benefits – we can identify the best programs in terms of profit (‘high customer value’ and ‘low cost’), or for other key outcomes like member acquisition, increasing take rate from competitor’s customers, etc.

2. Estimate shifts in market share that could result from changes to your program benefits

3. Examine incremental spend - attributable to program benefits - from a couple of different angles

If you’re looking to optimize your loyalty program resources to get as much benefit as possible, following this four step plan may cause you to think differently about your program, the benefits it offers and the potential that exists.  Focus on what, and who, is most important and pruning back where you may be over-delivering can help ensure that your program grows stronger, operating at peak performance, and delivering the results you need for your business. 

Judy Melanson leads the Travel & Entertainment practice and loves collaborating with clients on driving customer loyalty.  She's the mom of two teens and the wife of an oyster farmer. Follow Judy on Twitter at @Judy_LC

You have a loyalty program, you offer discounts, special rewards, and you track your growth.

Well so does everyone else.

Judy Melanson shares tips for optimizing your loyalty program so you can break away from the pack, and make the most of your loyalty investment.

Read more about our work with loyalty programs here.

I’m on record as saying that loyalty programs should focus on rewarding behaviors that have a direct financial benefit to the business (i.e., purchase, bookings, and sales).  Because of this belief, I was staunchly opposed to the concept of giving loyalty members “points for tweets.” But my thinking, like the role of social media in general, has evolved. 

One reason for my change of heart is that ‘social media’ no longer just means Facebook or Twitter…it now includes location-based tools (like FourSquare) and connecting to people ‘on the go’ through mobile apps. This new revolution (according to those who name new revolutions!) is called SoLoMo (social, location, mobile) media. 

Last month I led a panel discussion at the Loyalty Expo in Orlando on the role of social media in loyalty programs and it was clear from the start that we couldn’t talk about social media without talking about mobile and location-based services (SoLoMo!). The loyalty lifecycle shown below provides a basis for understanding how SoLoMo tactics can support member engagement:

 

Acquire:  To reach members that ‘look like’ your currently valuable members, Loyalty Marketers can use SoLoMo tools.  Two recent examples of programs developed to get members/customers to talk about a company/program are offered by Tasti D-Lite and Caesars.  TastiRewards incentivizes customers to associate their Twitter and Foursquare accounts with their Tasti D-Lite membership cards, posting a tweet or comment every time they order a delicious treat. Caesars recently relaunched Total Rewards, giving loyalty members points for tweets.  These SoLoMo initiatives can drive program awareness and member acquisition.

On-boarding:  Facebook, Twitter and other online communities (gated or not) are ideal platforms to introduce customers to the ‘loyalty club’ to let these newbies learn from like-minded members—and, importantly, encouraging them to use their rewards, rather than just letting them languish in their wallets.

Engage:  SoLoMo tools can be employed in a variety of ways to engage and strengthen relationships with current members.  Here are some examples:   

• Making rewards more obtainable:   Citi’s rewards app lets cardholders ‘pool’ rewards so they can plan a joint purchase, trip, or even make a charitable donation to an organization they support

• Surprise and delight your customers: Best Buy surprised (and no doubt delighted!) a few of its reward members with tickets to the Twilight movie premiere. Members were selected and invited based on past purchase history and spending potential.  

• Make rewards/currency more relevant:  Companies like ifeelgoods are offering loyalty programs as an option to provide a social currency to reward member’s behavior.  With 240 million active monthly users on Zynga, there’s a good chance at least some of your members would enjoy the opportunity to buy digital goods. 

Retain and win back:  While we don’t suggest giving up traditional channels for monitoring and responding to customer service failures, social media can let you discover failures (and wins!) quickly and begin the customer recovery process.

The bottom line is, your customers are social, they use Facebook and other sites, and they expect businesses to not only have a presence but to engage.  Sites like Facebook and Twitter are ideal platforms to engage and reward customers – particularly through SoLoMo tools.  So I’d like to report that I’ve “come around,” to see the value of social media for loyalty programs because of the opportunities they present to engage, and “surprise and delight” your most valuable customers.

Want to learn more about our approach to building Customer Loyalty? See how CMB helped GE CareCredit redesign their online customer advocacy panel, creating a community with high engagement and even higher returns. Watch the webinar.

Posted by Judy Melanson. Judy leads the Travel & Entertainment practice and loves collaborating with clients on driving customer loyalty.  She's the mom of two teens and the wife of an oyster farmer. Follow Judy on Twitter at @Judy_LC