Companies are starting to bridge the gap between the having data that is available, but either not gathered or properly used and taking advantage of Big Data to help influence customer behavior, Bill Hanifin, managing director of Hanifin Loyalty, Ft. Lauderdale, Fl., told an audience at the Badgeville Engage event in Chicago on Thursday.

Marc Parrish, vice president of membership and customer retention marketing for Barnes & Noble, pointed out that smart phones today outsell PCs, so people are always connected, but retailers have yet to take advantage of this trend. That is likely to change in the next 12 to 24 months as retailers look to boost their use of data to influence consumer behavior.

One way they will attempt to do that is by driving further engagement with customers through gamification and similar efforts, according to Parrish. For its part, Barnes & Noble is looking to boost customer engagement to further drive sales of its Nook and downloads to the device.

According to Parrish, many people get the device as a gift, use it once, then don’t pick it up again. A single usage isn’t enough to engage customers so they will want to use the device. Only 10 percent of those people become loyal customers. However, the company found that if it can engage people 20 times on the device, the customer retention rate is 100 percent. So the company is working with Badgeville to drive this level of customer engagement.

Hanafin pointed out that engagement is important throughout the customer’s interactions with the company, and shouldn’t be viewed as a one-time event.

This is true not only of consumers, but also for internal customers such as employees and managers to encourage behaviors such as learning corporate information, said Tyler Altrup, who recently joined Badgeville after leaving EMC, which uses a Badgeville solution for external and internal customers.

Chris Krohn, president and CMO of Restaurant.com, said his 12-year-old firm, which helps diners find discount deals at local restaurants, was looking for a way to offer a loyalty program to its customers.

“We didn’t have a CRM system,” Krohn said. But the company was concerned about liability issues for rewards that may remain unused for an extended period of time and are difficult to forecast in advance (for liability planning purposes).

By using the Badgeville platform, however, the company, which is a new customer for Badgeville, expects to benefit from the gratification, “bragging rights,” behavior modification and other benefits of loyalty programs without the associated costs. If the company decides in the future to do so, it can go back and assign cash (or cash equivalent, like  a gift card) rewards to holders of certain badge levels, with the ability to better determine liability after knowing how many customers have earned the rewards and are likely to in the future (based on historical data).

Recent Content

Membership and Pricing

Videos and podcasts

Membership and Pricing