Connecting loyalty programs and customer experience can truly reap a crowning achievement for brands. But, often times, and for various reasons, it doesn’t come together quite so easily.
Loyalty360 will host a compelling webinar titled, “The CX Payoff: How to Get the Most Out of Your Most Important Customers,” presented by Bond Brand Loyalty on Sept. 15, 2016, at 1 p.m. EDT. The webinar will delve into several key topics, including:
Design the right customer experience for your best customers using the latest methodologies in co-creation.
Turn design into a comprehensive Customer Experience playbook.
Execute with excellence; engage and galvanize your brand representatives to deliver your desired CX for your most loyal customers.
Sustain your Customer Experience efforts—making it a way of being for those who represent your brand.
The featured webinar speakers are: Morana Bakula, Bond Brand Loyalty’s Director of Customer Experience; Scott Robinson, Bond’s Vice-President of Loyalty Solutions; and guest speaker Kerry Bodine, co-author of “Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.”
Bakula participated in a Q&A with Loyaty360 to offer more insight about the webinar.
Why do brands continue to treat their loyalty program members the same as non-members? Why do you think this is the case?
Bakula: Bond has been talking about the convergence of Loyalty and Customer Experience for years, but unfortunately, many brands are still not stitching Loyalty Programs and Customer Experience together in a strategic way. Both have become a great focus for Marketers, but for the most part they have different owners, different budgets, and even different objectives. Loyalty Marketers have focused on Member experience but with a different orientation from a Customer Experience professional and as a result have not created differentiation for a member versus a non-member.
What should brands be doing as far as treatment of loyalty program members, compared to non-members?
Bakula: The answer is simple, but far from easy. First and foremost, Bond believes that it’s important to get it really right for your BEST customers (Members), rather almost right for all customers. Brands need to consider and design the end-to-end customer experience for their loyalty program members—across every touch point. Then, they need to deliver that experience consistently and in a way that is brand-aligned and meaningful.
Many brands focus on the program itself; focusing on tiers, status, communications, and ease of redemption. All critically important. However, they under-index on the experience a member has when they interact with the representative of a brand. I am a top tier member with one of my favorite retailers. They have a great deal of information about me; sometimes they send me a tailored email that makes me feel recognized. Yet when I walk into their stores, there is nothing different about the experience I have from that of the woman next to me who may be walking in for the first time. The first time I’m recognized as a member is when I’m checking out, and I certainly never feel special nor valued during that entire experience. I do get my points, which frankly means very little to me. Now, if that brand engaged me, if they made me feel known, if they did things for me that matter most to me—like save me time while I’m in the store—I would certainly go and tell my friends and family about how awesome it is to be in the top tier of that program. The brand wouldn’t need to explain the benefits: I would have experienced them and I would be explaining it to others on their behalf.
Do you think it’s more important for a brand to retain its best and most valuable customers than to acquire new ones?
Bakula: Typically, it’s five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one so it’s critical to focus on retaining your best and most valuable customers. Whether your priority is to acquire or retain customers, the work you should be focused on is engaging your customers. Engaging them so that they are active within your brand and on behalf of your brand—so they are not only purchasing but they also are referring, sharing and advocating. When they do so, you in turn need to recognize them for those efforts in ways that are most meaningful for them and across all the interactions they have with your brand. My guess … if more brands focused on engagement, acquisition and retention would require much less effort.
Can you talk about co-creation and how this impacts the right customer experience?
Bakula: In a market that is saturated with sameness (in product, quality, price), the ability to truly understand and then deliver on your customer needs and expectations, what would not only satisfy your customers, but would also delight them is a powerful way to differentiate. Customer co-creation allows a brand to engage the customer in defining this level of differentiation. Often brands take an inward approach when defining their customer experience. They gather groups of internal stakeholders, take market research and business objectives, and set to work on defining the experience. Customer Co-Creation allows the brand to take an outward approach ensuring that the final desired experience is not only reflective of the brand promise, but that it also resonates deeply with the most important audience—your customer.
Co-creation gives brand decision-makers a different type of insight—one that is authentic and human. We’re all trying to decode emotion in Customer Experience—there is no better way for a brand to understand emotion than to hear it and see it come directly from a loyal customer.