Meeting and, more importantly, exceeding customer expectations is the goal of any marketer. For Mark Robeson, Senior Vice President, Global Accounts, Aspire Lifestyles, it is paramount to the company’s tiered Concierge program.
Loyalty360 caught up with Robeson and discussed how the tiered Concierge offering impacts customer engagement and the customer experience.
What are Aspire Lifestyles’ goals for tiered Concierge moving forward?
Robeson: At Aspire, we are always trying to exceed client and customer expectations, and the tiered offering helps us do that by providing a more relevant program to each of the customer segments being served. The challenge for us, as providers and marketers of lifestyle services, is to keep tabs on the ways in which the population changes over time. We have to be aware of new segments, how they’re being defined and communicated with, and their unique psycho- and demographic profiles and behaviors. That information has to “flow through” each component of our program–from service delivery to channel offering to benefits and offers–in order to create the right customer experience and make the tiered offering successful. We expect more and more nuanced offerings in terms of segmentation in the next few years and our products will need to address new segments as they evolve.
Can you talk about how Aspire Lifestyles’ tiered Concierge model helps meet client/customer expectations?
Robeson: Aspire Lifestyles clients are always in the process of looking closely at how to better engage existing customers, generate incremental revenue, and create new revenue streams via segmentation. Competitive parity and differentiation also play into this equation. In order to meet these needs, we have seen in recent years a high demand from our clients for enhanced Concierge services for all customer segments: From “mass” consumers who may have a family of four and a household income of $60,000 all the way up to ultra-high net worth customers with hundreds of millions of dollars under management with a single wealth management company. Because the needs of these two customer segments—and the many demographics in between—can be vastly different, we chose some time ago to tier our own service offering in order to meet the needs of all of the end users of our services.
How long has Aspire Lifestyles offered a tiered Concierge model, how has it been received, and what sort of metrics are used to gauge performance?
Robeson: We have offered our clients bespoke Concierge program design for many years now. However, we are just launching a new technology platform which will improve our ability to service distinct segments differently, as well as more cost effectively. The platform has been received positively, as clients across industry verticals are all focusing on tiering services to meet needs of multiple client demographics. As for metrics used to gauge performance, typical goals for the concierge service generally have to do with engagement rate, usage rate, offer and benefit uptake, core product transaction frequency, and net promoter score. We may also have some metrics tied to loyalty program goals, if that plays a role in our program design. The specific goals will change program to program, depending on what we’re trying to achieve for a specific client.