Dennis Duffy, founder and President of Loyalogy, a leading provider of loyalty program analytics and consulting, told Loyalty 360 that his company’s new Online Analytic Dashboard provides brands with more useful customer insights focusing on location-based loyalty programs.
Duffy said this tool is very useful for the restaurant industry, and other location-based categories with loyalty programs such as retailers and hotel chains.
A common problem Duffy has found over the years is many companies have sparse loyalty program metrics they monitor consistently over time that offer little useful information and don’t identify key customer trends.
“The Dashboard provides better analytics in an interactive tool that people through the organization can use to understand customer behavior,” Duffy said. “When we work with companies with loyalty programs in place, what we often find is their reporting and things they might consider to analytics and insights are really pretty flat and one-dimensional – like how much spending occurred, how many visits, how many new people joined the program – metrics a high-level marketer can’t do anything with.”
What they don’t have, Duffy said, is location-based analytics that look at what’s happening in any week or month, how many joined, spend per visit, and how individual locations are doing
Loyalogy also launched its Loyalty Program Tune-Up service. The Dashboard product provides online interactive access to key loyalty program metrics while the Tune-Up service provides an in-depth analytic review of an existing program and a roadmap with specific strategic and tactical recommendations.
Many companies with loyalty programs are only looking at what happened in a specific week, Duffy explained.
“We allow them to go in and set their own parameters and look at trends over time,” he said. “Some companies say that they have 100,000 members who come in 2.7 times a year, but they often don’t know that those 100,000 people aren’t all the same 100,000. They probably lost 45,000 and picked up 45,000 new ones in the past year. We have a function for retention based on a location basis and how each of those locations retains customers. With location-based data, it makes it easier for marketers to drill down and use the data. It’s more robust in functionality and much more accessible. The first thing I ask companies is what things they are looking at. Some companies are only looking at two or three fundamental things that don’t’ tell them anything. They don’t have a roadmap. They focus on operational aspects.”
Technology is less expensive now and more readily integrated, especially in restaurants, Duffy said.
“More companies are able to launch loyalty programs now than they were seven to 10 years ago,” he said. “We help clients understand that a lot of people in loyalty programs (35%-50%) are the tryers because they join and you never see them again. And 3%-5% represent 25%-35% of the total spending. We look at how those segments fare relative to retention. When I take clients through that, without exception, clients say they never got information that good out of the program. It helps them understand better.”
Duffy said his company looks at operational aspects, the typical pattern of customer interaction, and what customers have to do to earn something through a specific loyalty program.
“We may recommend that a points threshold is too high or too low, and create a roadmap for rolling out a change to the membership base with plenty of advance notice,” he said. “And make sure you’re not creating any negative impact on your best customers.”