I just spent a couple days at Loyalty Expo at the lovely and capacious Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel in Orlando. It was a very good conference, and there was a lot of good thinking around the nature and direction of loyalty, and it was led off by some surprising findings for a show about how to do loyalty.

The first session was a panel presentation/discussion with Emily Murphy, Researcher - Forrester Research, Pamela Prentice, Chief Researcher – SAS, and Tim Suther, Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President – Acxiom.

They had conducted a group of studies along with Loyalty 360 around the state of loyalty; primarily from a loyalty manager’s point of view and their findings could be seen as less than encouraging for the Loyalty business, to wit:

• Loyalty members were 35% of the customer base of polled companies, and only 1/3 of those customers actually redeem.
• 83% of active customers in loyalty programs are interested in discounts and 51% of responding companies use discount based rewards
• Consumer attitudes toward loyalty programs are declining, as is the perceived value of programs from a customer point of view.
• Only one in four companies said that their loyalty programs were “very effective”
• Only 36% of companies surveyed integrate loyalty data with CRM...