For ICF Next and its clients, loyalty is defined as much more than just points and a program, but instead is approached in a more holistic and significant manner. By viewing loyalty as an outcome, ICF Next supports brands on their journeys of building successful programs and strategies. By fulfilling the role of tactical partner and through its proprietary customer loyalty technology , ICF Next can assist brands in creating relevant, seamless, and authentic connections with customers.
Loyalty360 recently talked to Guy Cierzan, managing partner at ICF NEXT, to learn more about the ins and outs of how the organization’s technology and strategic expertise helps clients foster loyalty throughout the entire customer journey, how the industry’s landscape has recently evolved, and the next big thing for customer loyalty.
Can you give us an introduction to your company? (ex: what do you, how you do it, industries you work with).
I’m managing partner of ICF NEXT, our loyalty division. We are a full-service loyalty proprietor, meaning that we help brands and clients from a broad loyalty perspective, from up-front strategy through the creative ideation phase and communication. We have a technology platform called Tally, that enables, empowers and provides the engine for loyalty. ICF Next also provides partnership, marketing and operates and executes loyalty on behalf of our clients. So, with a robust capability, we work with clients in very specific ways to support their loyalty endeavors.
Can you tell us a bit about your role within the organization?
As managing partner, I lead all facets of our loyalty and customer marketing business. From a business standpoint, and from an overall strategy standpoint. It’s a team of a few hundred folks, split across all those subject matter areas, specifically the Tally product, which is our loyalty platform. I also work with my counterparts more broadly at ICF NEXT on how do you connect loyalty and broadness to other facets of the digital ecosystem or marketing and advertising ecosystem? We’ve got a broader capability that expands brand, PR, Adobe and Salesforce capabilities. We have very broad change-management and organizational design capabilities. So, while my focus is loyalty, if you think about how loyalty has broadened and expanded, this has led me to work very closely with my colleagues and counterparts to incorporate other ICF NEXT capabilities into what we can deliver clients.
The next question we have is what is the biggest challenge or opportunity you’re seeing in regard to customer loyalty and customer experience today in light of what we’re seeing of the Coronavirus impacts?
Loyalty historically has been critically important and a strategic asset for a brand to engender customer loyalty, retention, and repeat purchases. In times of crisis, as we saw with the global financial crisis in 2008, 2009, and as we’re confronting COVID-19, loyalty again becomes a paramount asset to leverage to ensure that you’re continuing to keep communications, your value propositions, your relationship with your most loyal and most valuable customers in play and supported. It’s an aspect that can be leveraged in times of crisis, but maybe not in the traditional way that we think about it where we’re extending a lot of rewards and offers and marketing messages. Perhaps now it’s used as a more important channel to get real-time information, and critical messages. It’s really important and a strong conduit to your customers and to your most loyal members.
What do you think the biggest challenge in customer loyalty was pre-COVID-19? What were the challenges you were seeing late 2019, early 2020, with regards to customers loyalty? How may that have changed over the last, maybe prior to, 18 months?
I think we’re at an interesting time, relative to loyalty. One of the things that we’ve been seeing as loyalty is transforming and evolving is a bit of a shift and a pivot from what traditionally has been viewed as a marketing program, and a marketing channel, to something that really embraces more than its entirety, the experience. So, if you think about just the importance of data in customer loyalty, historically that data oftentimes has fed a marketing message or an offer, perhaps at times a little bit of a digital experience. We’re seeing more of an evolution or a transformation within loyalty to embrace data not just for those appropriate uses, but also to deliver the experience both much more broadly in the digital ecosystem and in the physical world. If you think about a brick-and-mortar retailer, think about a hotel, an airline. In all of those facets, data and the use of loyalty effectively has really transformed and accelerated, especially in the last 12 to 18 months, to embrace well beyond that traditional boundary and well beyond the idea that there’s a marketing mechanism that is much more experience-focused of late.
Can you give us an overview of your customer loyalty offering, your consulting practice, and the technology that you have with the Tally platform?
From the consulting standpoint, our broad offering has all the data, strategy, insight and expertise that you would expect. Oftentimes we’re asked to come in and work with a brand to reengineer their loyalty program, and to reimagine/refresh and bring it to a more modern era.
At the same time, we are asked to help a brand that maybe has never had a traditional loyalty program but is endeavoring to do one. In that case, we do some similar techniques, or bring in someone with similar capabilities, but we’re not necessarily refreshing something that has been in place from a legacy standpoint. We’re starting from square one.
The third area that rounds out our consulting is some brands are trying to solve a very specific business problem and they may be at a cross point wondering is customer loyalty or investing in a program the right decision for them. We can help a brand make that critical decision of is loyalty worth investing in, and if so, what might an ROI and a strategy for investing in it, be. More broadly, beyond that strategy, we also have all the supporting technology capability to drive, from an engine standpoint, all of the things that are necessary in loyalty. What we’re finding is that brands have also invested quite extensively in their own technologies. Salesforce is a great example, Adobe, etc.. And so, we’re finding that loyalty needs to compliment, integrate and work in a very flexible manner with those other investments that brands have made. While our technology platform Tally has robust capability, in its entirety we typically find that most brands want to use very specific aspects of the capability to compliment and round out other investments they’ve made.
What makes your platform unique and different than those in the market?
Data is at the heart of a lot of what drives and informs our strategy, but what sets us apart is we don’t just look at the data, analyze the data and say, well here’s what the data is saying. We take it from an inside standpoint to a much higher plane of action. One of the things that is a bit unique is almost an anthropological lens into the way that we look at data. What we’re trying to understand is that not just what is the data telling us but why might that be occurring?
If you think of certain behaviors to observe with customers in data, it’s great to understand the behaviors that are happening with customers or with customer segments, but if you can bring a richer view as to why it might be occurring, you have a better bet as to informing a strategy that can either sustain and/or change and alter that behavior. As core loyalty oftentimes is about changing behavior and/or influencing the behavior, and it’s very incumbent upon us and so we use that anthropology as a secret sauce to go beyond what the data is saying and try to make it more actionable as to, ok why is that happening and what do we do about it?