Customer Loyalty is a fickle thing and every tech platform seeks to offer a solution, but the reality is that no technology, no matter how slick the marketing, can solve this in a vacuum.
The data you need in order to power a meaningful and personalised loyalty program currently sits in disparate systems (ERP, Marketing platforms, eComm, POS, CRM not forgetting 3rd parties or partners). In the past the only way around this was to offer a store card so you really could capture all the customers’ habits, but this could only ever talk to existing loyal customers and only really worked for mono brands. We have seen tie ups with credit card companies but these in themselves are beset by the natural limitations of only working for a subset of customers. Every solution has, from it’s inception, focussed on a small customer group who are willing to participate and does not recognise or influence the wider customer behaviour.
In all these cases loyalty has put a burden on the customer and delivered scant rewards for either party.
So… how can we improve?
Imagine if you could free the data from all the silos, imagine you had access to this data in real time in every channel, imagine what loyalty would look like then! Suddenly you can personalise and influence behaviour, suddenly you can incentivise and reward your customers.
Simply put, if you have a loyalty strategy then you need to feed it with the information you already have. Otherwise, no matter how good the technology or the strategy, the returns will be 5-15% of what is possible. @salesforce recognise this issue and a key component of the Loyalty Cloud solution is data management. Loyalty experts @Antavo, who lead the specialist Loyalty field, also focus on data inputs in order to maximise the effectiveness of the ROI.
In any case, whilst Loyalty is clearly a key pillar for retail success, you need to look at how you can #FreetheData in order to fuel your loyalty strategy.