Brands that truly find success with loyalty programs believe that they are more than simply a way to access customer information. To be sure, such data collection mechanisms can be a valuable aspect of any loyalty program, but this feature alone should not be the sole purpose of the marketing initiative.
Officials at METRO Cash & Carry, an international B2B-related self-service wholesaler, understand this philosophy. It is also the driving force behind METRO’s customer engagement efforts.
METRO serves more than 21 million professionals across 27 countries, and takes pride in its ability to connect and engage with a wide range of independent businesses on an individual level. By creating a tight bond between both its employees and those it serves, METRO views its loyalty program as more than a customer engagement strategy. It’s a way to build deeper personal relationships.
It may not have always been this way, but METRO has taken great strides to become more focused on the customer.
“In the past three years, METRO Cash & Carry totally switched perspectives from being ego-centric to customer-centric,” Igor Bagnobianchi, Head of Loyalty Programme, within CRM, told Loyalty360. “From this transition came the new You & Metro campaign, which is a commitment to place the customer at the center of our activities, and to carry this attitude across every aspect of the organization, suppliers and partners.”
Many of METRO’s core customers exist across the hotel, restaurant, and catering industry. So the You & Metro campaign was launched as a way to personally engage these segments and build beneficial partnerships between them.
“We want to become the champion for independent business,” Bagnobianchi said. “We understand that our customers are entrepreneurs who are facing daily challenges and fierce competition, and we want to support them, in making their businesses profitable and enduringly sustainable.”
Effective customer engagement is about emotions and the human connections that drive these relationships. More than just a mechanism to collect data, the loyalty generated between a brand and a customer can, and should, run much deeper. For Bagnobianchi, it can be more akin to the affinity felt between family or sports team members.
“To grow customer loyalty, there are four main elements that a business cannot miss,” Bagnobianchi explained. “You need to give value back, offer support and recognition, be interactive and fun, and maintain reliability. If you manage to fulfill these four, it is very likely that customers will be loyal and engaged. The successful recipe has many ingredients.”
Today, this means engaging customers on multiple levels and across several channels. There are, of course, numerous options for brands to leverage. The rise of social, mobile and other emerging technologies certainty present a dynamic and challenging environment for most marketers.
But, the key is to focus on customer-centricity. Brands that are truly customer-centric may find it much easier to decide which to channels to leverage, and which will yield the best results.
“There are certain waves of hype related to new technologies and process innovations,” Bagnobianchi said. “But we must understand what resonates with the customer. Would customers, for example, actually spend time during shopping to check their smartphone for more than two push messages? When would these messages become bothering instead of engaging? We definitely have to test and deploy new technologies with the clear objective of offering seamless and relevant content to customers. We should not adopt technology just for the sake of the technology itself, but to dramatically improve the customer journey.”
In the end, the ultimate goal, beyond effectively engaging the customer, should be to make the entire process as personal, as meaningful, and as simple as possible.
METRO currently exists at the edge of this pursuit, and it is a process that the brand plans to continuously perfect.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.