Jaimey Wilman, Director of Marketing, Action Bag participated in an engaging Q&A with Loyalty360 to discuss her 
company’s take on customer loyalty, engagement, technology, and challenges.
How do you define loyalty, what does it mean to your organization, and how has it changed in recent years?
In the simplest of terms, loyalty means the customer continues to purchase our products and engage with our brand. We have been blessed with very loyal customers over the years. Our dual markets serve the packaging industry and our product can be considered a commodity and a branding tool. Once we win over a customer, we generally keep them with repeat orders. Of course in recent years, technology and competition continue to evolve. Price transparency and customers’ ability to price shop create a continual challenge on maintaining customer loyalty.
How has the strategy and focus changed in recent years?
Today’s customers, whether B2C or B2B, want value for their money. The customer demand is quality, but at a competitive price. In recent years, our strategy has shifted more toward stronger sourcing, driving efficiencies, and cost reductions so we can compete with the price shopping easily done with a quick search engine query, while at the same time still offering quality and the value added services our customers enjoy.
What does Customer Experience/Customer Engagement mean to your organization, and how has it changed over recent years or since you have been on the job?
In the past, our customer experience and engagement was generally direct mail driven and over the telephone. Our catalog mailings drove phone orders and our team was building relationships over a phone call. Key tactics were telemarketing and outbound calls to reactivate or re-engage customers. Then enter the World Wide Web and email communication. This has changed how all of us do business and live our lives. Now the customer experience is based more on functionality and user-friendly features of our website, digital catalogs, and search engine marketing. Engagement is more often measured with clicks, likes, and tweets in our social media spaces. No matter the point in history, the channel, or customer touch point, the ultimate goal is to secure the sale and keep customers coming back for more.
What group runs it within your organization? How has the strategy and focus changed in recent years?
We believe that all departments impact our customer experience and engagement activities. Sales and marketing drive customer communication and interaction, but all departments are empowered to make decisions based on what is right for the customer and the business. Whether this is a warehouse team member shipping the order accurately, or an accounting clerk correctly billing an order–all these actions are touch points for the customer, which create their impression of our brand and desire to continue to do business with us.
What are the biggest challenges and opportunities in the next two years?
I see the business challenges and opportunities both derive from technology. Technology impacts how we live our lives and is changing more rapidly than ever before. The challenge is keeping up with it all. The opportunity lies in knowing what technology will support your business longevity and what technology with related to your core customer base. Jumping on the latest technology craze can be a good strategy, but if it doesn’t relate to your customer base or business objectives, then you might be wasting time and resources.
Marketers are tasked to be more data-centric than ever before, yet the challenge of creating actionable insight from data is more challenging than before. What is your advice for marketers?
Today, marketers can be swimming in data overload from many sources−internal systems versus website analytics versus affiliates and beyond. Merging siloed data is the first step. Now that you have all this data, one can easily get lost in rabbit holes of data analysis. Take a step back and define your goals. These can range from annual, quarterly, monthly, or project based goals. Once you know the goals, then you can determine the metrics you need to measure to reach the goals. Knowing what you are measuring streamlines data analysis. Re-evaluate the data needs as your goals shift. The old adage of what gets measured gets done comes to mind. Using the right data to create the right actions to drive success.