Chuck Christianson didn’t need to go far to learn about what expectations younger consumers would have when it comes to loyalty and rewards programs. After all, the executive vice president and chief revenue officer for cxLoyalty has a 15-year-old daughter living just down the hall.
“Just like that,” says Christianson as he snaps his fingers. “They expect everything instantly because they’re ‘digital natives.’ They’ve grown up where information can be brought to them just literally within seconds, and it’s still not fast enough.”
During a recent interview with Loyalty360’s Mark Johnson, Christianson touched on several new and tried-and-true approaches when it comes to customer engagement, including what the future holds for the Gen Zers.
“What we can learn from these younger consumers is that it doesn’t have to be anything of great value that you should be delivering, but rather it’s content of any sort,” he says. “It can be informative content, or it can also be value-based content.”
Micro-Moment Incentives
Christianson calls those moments ‘micro-moment’ incentives that might grab a Gen Zer’s attention and cause them to react. For example, checking in to a hotel for the first time, and rather than awarding points for that first stay, a brand might send them a digital gift certificate to a local coffee shop or a diner, or even a digital movie pass.
“There are different ways of delivering micro-moments or incentives that cost about the same as a point-accrual on a brand’s balance sheet, and it’s going to be able to engage those customers more quickly,” Christianson says.
Research has shown that Gen Zers are more transactional, so offering them points for purchases to cash in later may not be the proper approach.
“Having them bank millions of points is not necessarily where they’re going to go, but they will engage, and their engagement has a rapidity that is probably a hundred times as fast as someone of my age,” he says. “I think brands need to be able to understand their behaviors and what is resonating with them.”
Driving a Deeper Connection
cxLoyalty’s strength is building programs that help brands drive deeper connections with their customers to give them reasons to engage more and stay longer. They achieve this through their extensive content catalog, delivered through their technology, informed by their analytics, all with frictionless customer experience.
The company has about 3,000 employees in 20 countries, with more than 1,000 of them working as technologists creating platforms and programs. Before the pandemic hit everyone, cxLoyalty was moving about $3 billion worth of rewards or other content through channels for its clients.
Christianson says cxLoyalty has been focused the last several years on improving personalization efforts for its brands, including making what he calls ‘serious investments’ in technology platforms.
“We are taking the concept of both redemptive offers and always-on offers and putting those all into a consolidated platform which we call cxInteract,” he says. “It takes all of that content and makes it intelligent through a variety of different ways; content intelligence and customer intelligence coming together in the right moment is key.”
Adding Geo-Location
An example is adding geo-location technology into your brand’s real-time platform offerings. Christianson says cxLoyalty recently partnered with a financial technology firm to help drive card spend at the pump by introducing geo-triggered push notifications sent to a smartphone or smartphone-enabled device. For example, a motorist driving by a pay-at-the-pump convenience store will receive a push notification alerting them with real-time fuel discounts.
“We’re able to take the ability to understand where a customer is, what is attractive to them, and then be able to speak to them in the moment,” he says. “I think that is extremely key to being relevant to the new COVID loyalty landscape because it’s going to very much be driven by a hybrid of the personal and the digital, and those two have to really go hand-in-glove.”
All that goes back to Christianson’s example with his own daughter and realizing what the post-COVID consumer may want from a rewards program. He says it is the micro-moments that are fairly instant, as opposed to accumulating points.
“I feel those types of point systems will go by the wayside sooner or later,” he says. “Some of those members are aging out, and I’m probably one of those members who save up a million Marriott points or several million Delta points to take a big trip. But I see micro-moments as a major trend in terms of where we’re going in the industry.”
Visit cxloyalty.com to learn more about how our solutions can foster micro-moments between your brand and customer base.