Brands Raise the Bar on Partner Expectations, Share Hurdles on Building a “Best-in-Class” Experience

 

As I referenced in my last blog on the “logo jungle,” we continue to see an increased focus from brands on customer loyalty. Regarding that focus, on January 30th, we had the privilege of conducting a webinar with SAP on a soon-to-be-released joint research study: The State of Best-in-Class Customer Experience Report. The paper will be released on Loyalty360 over the next couple of weeks, and in the interim you can find an infographic here that should give you an insightful preview.
 
The State of Best-in-Class Customer Experience Report was designed to understand marketers’ challenges with regard to customer loyalty efforts and improving their customer experience and engagement strategies. The report also addresses challenges that we saw emerge from the research, such as a need develop trust with audiences, drive deeper emotive loyalty, and meet customer expectations on personalization, consistency, and responsiveness. The ability to address said challenges will offer brands the opportunity to differentiate themselves against their competitive set in 2019 and forward. 
 
The research paper concluded a series in which Loyalty360 and SAP penned two other qualitative reports: The Challenge of Personalization: A Qualitative Peer-Driven Perspective and The Ever-Changing State of the Modern Customer: How Customers Are Changing and How Marketers Should Respond. Our partnership with SAP also led to three webinars, several infographics, and finally, The State of Best-in-Class Customer Experience Report. The question of what best-in-class customer experiences look like continues to receive greater attention within our community.
 
The timeliness of this research could not be any more auspicious, as the topic of “best in class” has probably been the most prominent and sought after in the first six weeks of 2019. One of the questions we ask brand representatives is, “If you could ask one question of a technology supplier, a customer, or a competitor, what would that question be?” This question always seems to stump our interviewees, especially if we haven’t sent them our list of interview questions beforehand.
 
When we ask this question, it usually solicits responses concerning what is next, what technologies competitors are looking at, and what customers really want. So far in 2019, as I speak with many members of Loyalty360, I’ve identified an interesting trend from this question: representatives are deciding to move their customer loyalty programs in-house. This shift is happening incrementally, as brands still may leverage providers for technology but ultimately plan to take programs over totally in the coming years.
 
The reason for this shift may be that marketers are demanding more transparency around their programs, more detailed metrics, and a community of peers with which to engage. In The State of Best-in-Class Customer Experience Report and in our conversations with brand representatives, we’ve seen that these trends are consistent across industries. Key challenges lie around customer trust, data privacy, internal knowledge gaps, rapidly changing and increasingly complex technologies, and integration around (not-so) intelligent legacy marketing systems. To succeed, brands not only have to keep up with their day-to-day responsibilities. They also need to be able to decipher complexities not present in the marketing environment just two years ago. However, if they can decipher these complexities, they will create much-needed simplicity in customer engagement and experience.
 
Decoding complexities will require brands to tackle a big challenge around technology. To compound the problem, this challenge has two facets. The first is that 69 percent of the marketers we’ve spoken to do not feel they have the technical skills required to excel in this new marketing environment. Second, 50 percent feel they do not have the soft skills required to manage these technical programs. In addition, technology providers are challenged to substantiate ROI for their brand clients, who want to increase the efficacy of their personalization efforts.
 
In fact, one respected senior marketer who runs a successful customer loyalty program said, “I realized X [a technology provider] did not know much about customer loyalty. They had some technology, yet they never seemed to answer my questions.” This marketer realizes that staying complacent is not an option and that brands must focus more acutely on the needs of their customers.  That may result in taking actions not previously possible.
 
Loyalty360 continues to hear this from many brand marketers that we interview. For example, from a study last year, we found that 50 percent of the representatives we interviewed did not feel that the technology providers they were working with understood them or their needs. Because of this, marketers are focusing more resources on their customer loyalty efforts and a greater number of them want to bring their efforts in house. They want to engage with their peers to understand how to do so.
 
Still, 2019 is shaping up to be a great year for customer loyalty. Over the next couple of weeks, Loyalty360 will be rolling out our first industry briefs (www.technologytoday.org). These should assist marketers in their efforts to take ownership of their programs.

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