POSTED : August 12, 2015
BY : Clay Walton-House
Categories: Loyalty & Connected Membership
For loyalty marketers today, approaching loyalty strategy in an integrated manner means looking holistically across the customer experience to determine where the greatest opportunities exist to impact known drivers of customer behavior. This often requires the application of disciplines that extend beyond the bounds of traditional loyalty marketing. Now, customer experience design, digital technology, and product or service design bring to the fore value propositions that shift consumer perception and increase likelihood to continue patronage of the brand.
So what truisms can be applied for loyalty marketers seeking to enhance their core product or service experience as part of an integrated loyalty strategy? Three words: Ease, Simplicity, and Speed. These three words serve as paradigms for customer experience today, and brands who have focused on them have reaped the rewards in both acquiring new customers, as well as maintaining higher retention and growth rates from existing customers.
What underpins the need for these paradigms are market trends that are inherent to the evolution of our society:
These basic and ubiquitous consumer trends accelerate the need for brands to offer engagement opportunities optimized around Ease, Simplicity, and Speed. Delivery on these paradigms allows brands to stay relevant and build loyalty through their core experience, in addition to traditional loyalty marketing tactics they may deploy.
Look no further than Amazon.com as the company that most fundamentally drives their business through the lens of these three paradigms. CEO Jeff Bezos and team have built a culture that is founded upon accelerated experimentation, all with the end goal of delivering on these basic consumer needs in a disruptive manner. They have focused deeply on Ease and Simplicity by optimizing features like one-click ordering, product recommendations, and the returns process—and been market leaders in Speed by investing in a best-in-class fulfillment and distribution model that enables incredibly fast delivery times. Their innovation in this space, in addition to the price competitiveness upon which they are built, has made them the behemoth they are today. Further, they have developed a very balanced, well-rounded value proposition that is hard to ignore by combining their focus on the core service experience with more traditional loyalty marketing tactics in use with the Prime program. It is for these reasons that Amazon may be the best example of a company who has developed a truly integrated approach to building customer loyalty.
Yet Amazon is not the only company that has focused on Ease, Simplicity, and Speed to great effect.
The customer experiences delivered by these brands provide helpful examples for other loyalty marketers taking an integrated approach to loyalty.
In what ways can you integrate Ease, Simplicity, and Speed into your core product or service experience to enhance value to the customer? How will these changes dovetail with your existing loyalty marketing tactics? Where is the greatest ROI?
Clay Walton-House serves as Managing Director of Integrated Loyalty Solutions at Concentrix Catalyst. He helps Fortune 500 companies create and implement new customer engagement strategies that accelerate growth and build loyalty. His expertise lies in understanding consumer behavior and translating it into actionable customer insights. Clay has a proven track record of successful loyalty program design and optimization, helping uncover ways to build retention and loyalty strategies into a company’s broader business model.