For any consumer-facing brand, employee engagement is every bit as important in driving positive outcomes as customer engagement. Knowing this fact, Bond Brand Loyalty recently launched SynapzeCX, which, according to the company, enables businesses “to engage, teach, motivate, and measure impact in ways that meet the unique needs of channel partners and employees.”
To learn more about the new product and the market need that it was designed to fulfill, Loyalty360 recently spoke with Bob Macdonald, President and CEO of Bond Brand Loyalty, and Morana Bakula, Vice President of Customer Experience.
Macdonald first discussed the company context which led to the development of SynapzeCX. “Businesses and experiences create bonds,” he said. “We use things like human-centered design, loyalty mechanics, and data science to drive performance to any audience, including a membership base of consumer-based loyalty programs, but we’re also starting to apply those loyalty mechanics and human-centered design principles to employees, channels, retailers, and sales agents. Then we can use those same influencing behaviors, modifying behaviors, aligning behaviors, and activity against what the brand desires, the direction that brand is looking for.”
To this assessment, Bakula added the statement that CX today is “fragmented and siloed.” Many brands have appointed chief customer officers and similar positions in recent years, but it’s still not the norm. She observed that organizations are looking at the customer journey “in fragmented ways,” and she said that too often “you have someone who’s responsible for the online interactions with the customer and the programmatic aspects of a loyalty initiative, and then you have the people-interaction of the customer experience elsewhere.”
This is where SynapzeCX comes in. Bakula said, “In order for the customer experience to really be optimized and effective, easy, effortless, and emotionally rich, the brand needs to design experiences across that journey, and they need to enable their people, whether that’s at the frontline level or the channel level, to deliver those experiences.”
Bakula said the technology “works to enable employees to deliver brand-aligned customer experiences with consistency.” She also noted that SynapzeCX enables employees to access information in a manner similar to the way they are used to accessing information as consumers (in contrast to many e-learning platforms, which have sometimes been high-friction, which disengages employees). “We treat the individuals the way we would treat them if they were customers,” Bakula said.
The point is to achieve high-performing, experience-minded organizational culture. Macdonald added, “The notion of culture being the biggest strategic differentiator—something that’s hard for anyone to rip-off—is an important one. The ability to replicate pricing, replicate product is well-known across all industries. Ultimately, the culture of the brand and the alignment and consistency of that culture are what drive audiences to connect with that brand.”
When asked how organizations with longevity and staid cultures might respond to a platform like SynapzeCX, he said, “There are large, 100-year-old businesses that have got particular ways of doing things, such as a directive approach. Even with barriers, some of those businesses are embracing this at the most strategic, senior levels imaginable. We believe the time is right, because the sentiment has been there for a long time, and if there’s a technology, agency, or partner like us to help support it across many different fields and functions, it enables that executive vision to come to life.”
Bakula emphasized that SynapzeCX is intended for businesses at various stages in their journeys. “We like to meet businesses where they are,” she said. “Commonly though, and recently, we’re meeting them at the design stage, where we are helping them map the end-to-end customer journey. We have a methodology that we call ‘engagement mapping,’ which maps the entire journey that the customer has across human and digital channels.”
She continued, “We focus on functional and emotional drivers of a customer experience, and ultimately, we quantify the gap between the current and the desired state. Implementation follows, whether that means a loyalty program redesign, starting the culture transformation process, or looking at the lifecycle of communications in the customer-experience marketing domain.”
In addition, Macdonald said that SynapzeCX complements the programmatic features of a brand’s loyalty efforts. “The data that loyalty provides combined with the personalized interactions that this type of offering provides is, I think, where the magic is. The customers that we’re working with on this would agree.”