Hinda Incentives is a B2B company in Chicago with a long history of offering employee and customer engagement products and services through its Hinda Loyalty Group practice. Its employee recognition platform is designed to connect employees to their organizations in ways that promote success, foster innovation and collaboration, improve customer service and retention, and boost productivity. Its customer engagement platform is intended to help build compelling websites for loyalty programs; increase customer visits to those sites through campaigns, promotions, and special offers; enhance the customer experience; foster customer advocacy with special packaging and personalization strategies; and take advantage of special gifting programs to surprise and delight customers.
Recently, Loyalty360 discussed customer loyalty and personalization, among other things, with Hinda President Mike Donnelly.
How has customer loyalty changed over the last few years?
We are finding that consumers are engaging more often with brands that they feel aligned with from a values perspective. Purchase behavior is not always influenced by best price or convenience, but more about the relationship the consumer feels they have with the brand and their collective alignment in values.
What is the biggest challenge that your clients face in driving deeper customer loyalty?
The biggest challenge is relevancy and speaking to the consumer in a voice and with information that resonates with them personally. Consumers have come to expect that organizations have data specific to their profile and consumers expect that organizations will use it to provide them with relevant information that they are interested in. This is a challenge for some organizations who perhaps have data stored in non-connected or unaligned systems.
If you could recommend one thing to a client to help them with this challenge, what would it be?
If you cannot connect the data in a way that the consumer will see as relevant, don’t use it. It is far worse to send the consumer a targeted message that is not on target, especially from a brand the consumer feels should know them.
What is “next big thing” for customer loyalty?
The most successful rewards and loyalty programs are the ones that are relevant and easy for the customer. We feel that means reaching the customer where they are through technology, including chatbot technology. Customers are experiencing more and more bot-based interfaces in their homes with Alexa, phones with Siri, and online customer service that constantly evolves its level of personalization ad effectiveness thanks to artificial intelligence. Even though all customers feel their needs are incredibly unique, the availability of data and information can streamline the service and shopping process while also maximizing resources for when a true human interaction is necessary. The chatbot interface can be effective in allowing customers to check their balance, identify point earning activities, or completing simple redemption activities. There is a growing list of service providers in this area that can make implementation more time and cost-effective through one master channel instead of historically needing to have one connection to Facebook, a second to SMS, another to Twitter, and so on.
How important is personalization?
Personalization is huge, especially when it comes to content delivery and rewards. We are finding that consumers want not only content that speaks to them, but rewards that speak to them. For some, this means focusing on rewards that bring convenience to their lives (think subscription boxes, Uber rides, same-day delivery, home and personal services) as well as reducing the time it takes for them to receive an award. Trends are showing that consumers appreciate the ability to get a small reward quicker than always saving for a larger award.