Loyalty Is the Missing Link in Customer Experience

Loyalty management has moved on from the days of rewards and campaigns offered by your local supermarket. It’s now a fundamental component of a successful customer experience strategy for both business and consumer buyers.

Two weeks ago I had the chance to attend the big handshake loyalty event in Amsterdam to meet with the people leading this market. As a seasoned CRM expert I was surprised to discover four key things about loyalty management:

1. The number of companies that have loyalty management solutions and programs is still far too low
2. Organisations are struggling to decide which department loyalty sits in
3. It’s very disjointed from customer centric operation and initiatives like CX, CRM, customer service and sales
4. It’s just starting to embrace digitalization, the use of Artificial Intelligence, CRM and getting value out of the data for personalization.

In an experience economy world we live in, we should pay more attention to loyalty management. Listening and discussing with loyalty professionals, it became clear to me that “loyalty management is the essential missing link in customer experience”.

You might be saying… loyalty is the result of great experience. I definitely agree however here is a non-integrated function where we persuade and reward customers in order to make them loyal. We track and measure behavior. That means we need to embrace this function in organizations.

In order to fully realize the potential of loyalty management we need to redefine it from transactional to emotional loyalty, and provide personalized and gamified engagements.

Points and gifts don’t make customers loyal, effortless experiences in meaningful moments with your brand do!

Interestingly, the technology landscape seems to reinforce antiquated thinking around rewards. They are trying to reinvent themselves but it’s making it difficult for buyers to know which company to invest in. In addition, new companies such as Neoday and Antovo are complicating the decision making process even further.

Companies that learn and reward from a customer behavior perspective instead of points will redefine the market. By embedding loyalty in customer engagement and customer experience strategies companies are going to win in this experience economy.