Clutch Receives Notable Recognition in Customer Loyalty Solutions Arena

Founded in 2012, Clutch empowers consumer-focused businesses to identify, target, message, and engage their best customers. Its modular Consumer Management (CM) platform enables companies to capture customer data across all channels including in-store, online, social, and mobile. The data is segmented real-time based on unique customer engagements, and then analyzed for improved customer success.
More than 450 companies have partnered with Clutch to help drive additional spend, frequency, and overall engagement with their customers. The company earned recognition in the recently released and prestigious Forrester Wave report

Clutch CEO Ned Moore participated in a Q&A with Loyalty360 to discuss this notable achievement and his company’s main goals regarding customer loyalty.

The Forrester Wave recognition is very prestigious and noteworthy. What does this mean for Clutch and its place in the customer loyalty solutions arena?

Moore: It’s really another validation point of how we approach genuine customer loyalty, as a result of data-driven, holistic brand experiences for the customer. Loyalty has largely been incorrectly viewed as a transaction-based event rooted in discounts and coupons. This often attracts customers that are loyal to bargains rather than the companies. We help businesses identify, understand, and engage their customers through a centralized customer management platform that uses data from everywhere customers interact with them. Our proprietary event engine allows businesses to track individual customer profiles on their exact activities and utilize data from all systems. Whether it is making purchases, spending time on a specific screen in the mobile app, or checking in at a particular location, our platform enables companies to have visibility, understand what is happening, and act accordingly. This intelligence is used to deliver personalized, automated engagements and experiences designed to motivate and influence behaviors with the brand. These experiences provide relevancy and value to the customer, which ultimately earn trust and loyalty.
It’s exciting to have Forrester recognize this with their Wave report on customer loyalty and say, “Consider Clutch if you need marketing support that goes beyond loyalty.”

In many ways, it seems that customer loyalty solutions companies have to cater to clients much the same way brands have to cater to customers to instill loyalty. What does Clutch do to go above and beyond client expectations?

Moore: Many brands are looking for both the strategy and technology to identify and understand their customers in order to deliver exceptional experiences. Given this, we place a heavy focus on both the innovation and support we provide to our clients. On the technology side, our platform brings streamlined simplicity to today’s incredibly complex customer data environment by synthesizing the data across disparate sources to deliver a 360-degree view of their customer. Our platform also does the heavy lifting when it comes to delivering and optimizing segmented, personalized campaigns across any channel including email, online, social, mobile and even direct mail.
 
On the strategy side, many companies want the benefit of insight and best practices on program design, reward structure, and trigger dimensions. Brands also want to understand what works both in and outside their industries to motivate and influence consumers. This is why we provide comprehensive Managed Services support from strategic design through program operation.

Forrester commended both our technology and support solutions, by saying, “Clients [of Clutch] praise their
account management and willingness to go above and beyond.”

What are loyalty marketers doing well today and where do the challenges for them lie?

Moore: Upward of 80% of your customers now expect your brand to deliver tailored marketing to them based on their previous engagements and understand everything they are doing with your business. This represents the big opportunity and is the root of the big challenges that lie ahead.

The marketing teams that are investing in identifying and understanding their customers holistically are finding tremendous value and competitive advantages in their ability to motivate their customers to earn genuine loyalty and derive incremental value.

The challenges lie in a couple key areas. First, most marketing activities are fragmented and focused on the campaign, not the customer. MarTech and AdTech companies span social, mobile, in-store, online, and other engagement points with all kinds of promises of ROI for their individual performances and touch points, but provide little or no cross functional understanding of the business’s whole customer view.

Second, many marketers still get pulled into the ‘set it and forget’ and ‘one-size-fits-all’ marketing initiatives when it comes to existing customers. It’s not hard to deliver dynamic, personalized marketing today with the right technology and strategy, but too many marketers think this is way out of reach and stick by the old standby campaigns that will become less and less effective as their competitors invest in a complete understanding of their customers.

How have metrics changed for loyalty marketers and how does Clutch assist in that regard?

Moore: The metrics have not changed all that much – what’s changed is the ability to strategically respond and influence those metrics across an array of digital and traditional channels. We even highly personalize direct mail campaigns for brands and provide the ability to immediately measure the results, modify and optimize the campaigns.

The one area of marketing metrics that has expanded and will continue to gain adoption is behavioral and intent information. Building relevant metrics around conversions and attribution based on a customer’s immediate and long-term intent, along with behavioral profiles, will provide more insight into the efficacy of campaigns. Understanding what metrics are important and meaningful to your business and customer base holistically will be a trend we continue to see within forward-moving consumer-focused companies.

Does Clutch have a sweet spot or target client as far as size goes?

Moore: We have clients of all size. We certainly have seen larger, international brands adopting our solutions, but even the industries they come from are eclectic. For example, we’re delivering solutions and strategies to brands ranging from Crabtree & Evelyn and Meineke to Rawlings and Wizard World, all dramatically different businesses with similar customer challenges.

The bottom line is if a company sells to consumers, many struggle with the same issues in identifying, understanding and engaging their customers.

Technology changes so fast these days and it’s difficult for marketers to stay on top of it all. How does Clutch manage this?

Moore: At Clutch, our platform philosophy is to be open and create easy ways to adopt and incorporate new technologies into our platform. Over the past year, we have integrated over 20 new platforms and will continue to look to develop or integrate new dimensions our clients find relevant and valuable in working with their customers. We don’t necessarily know what the best new technology will be three years from now, but we provide our customers the ability to rapidly incorporate these emerging advancements to immediately engage their customers to create a competitive advantage.

How would you say Clutch has evolved its offerings in recent years?

Moore: A lot of our solution evolutions have been driven by clients’ needs. For example, as clients required more strategic advisory and execution support we developed a Client Insights & Strategy team that works directly with them to design, develop, execute and measure marketing engagements.

In terms of technology, we take a similar approach. So when we develop platform evolutions that extend to customer scoring, social engagements, advanced segmentation or other dimensions, they are often based on emerging needs and challenges we see from our clients.

For a brand seeking customer loyalty solutions, what should it consider as priorities?

Moore: There are a lot of considerations for selecting customer loyalty and marketing solutions. We tend to break it down initially into some fundamental questions to ask, including:

Can the platform synthesize all of my brand’s cross-channel customer data?
Can it help you identify and understand my most valuable customers?
Can it provide ongoing actionable customer insights?
Can it deliver real-time, personalized, motivating cross-channel experiences?
Can it optimize my marketing for maximum impact?
Can it operate as a multi-dimensional marketing platform?
Can it provide the sophistication to drive loyalty program enrollment?

While there are lots of “loyalty” solutions out in the market, most focus on one specific channel, be it social, mobile, ecommerce or in-store. Brands really need to consider this. While there is often a pressing motivator, like solving for social or mobile issue or opportunity, you don’t need another technology solution that sits in a silo and can’t deliver or participate on a cross-channel basis to completely understand your customers.
 
How would you describe the impact of mobile on customer loyalty?

Moore: While there is tremendous buzz around mobile, it’s still largely an emerging channel for most brands when it comes to loyalty. Consider that Starbucks is recognized as one of the leaders of mobile adoption and they’re still only at 21% of total transactions on mobile. Most businesses are focused on where the bulk of their customers are, which is a smart strategy to start with.

As mobile continues to grow, so will the focus of brands on this channel. The issue arises when brands opt to have a mobile solution simply to have a mobile solution and fail to understand how their customers engage the channel and how this supports their brand goals to enhance the customer’s experience.

Mobile will be a tremendous opportunity and we see the landscape changing from “channels” and more to a holistic point of view. As we go forward, businesses that look at their strategy and goals through the complete lens of anyway customer engagement takes place, and not segmenting their channels will gain better consumer understanding and attraction. It’s no longer in-store, online, mobile, social, etc. – it’s simply a business and we must sell, engage, and meet our customers everywhere they want to meet us.

What is the current state of loyalty marketing, and where do you envision it heading in the next five years?

Moore: Across many industries, the concept of loyalty has largely been relegated to a transaction in lieu of a longstanding commitment from the customer. The ‘buy three, get the fourth free’ approach doesn’t earn trust, develop commitment, or result in genuine loyalty. Many brands are realizing this, along with the idea that embracing discounts as the backbone of their engagements doesn’t result in loyalty and often ends up diminishing customer relationships, eroding margin and even attracting the wrong type of customer.
We’re certainly seeing a paradigm shift among many companies and industries that are embracing the concept that loyalty is driven by the entire holistic customer experience they deliver. The key to this is the consistency and relevancy of customer engagements everywhere and time that the customer wants to interact with us. This requires a complete understanding of our customers and exactly what they are doing with us.

Historically, this has been a tall order given the disparate channels and systems across in-store, ecommerce, online, mobile, social, and the Internet of Things (IoT) but the technology now exists to bring this complex data together in order to identify, understand and engage your customers. This delivers massive competitive advantages to companies who invest in this type of customer system and marketing platform.
On top of all this, the organizational owners of these traditional channels are typically fragmented across an array of teams. This requires teams to come together and put their customers at the center of their business to obtain the best outcomes for their companies.

Over the next five years, we will see the adoption of more customer centric organizational structures and, along with this, the consolidation of fragmented customer marketing tools into a central customer system and marketing platform. This will unlock sophistication along with new and exciting ways to be relevant and meaningful to existing customers, driving exponential value and competitive advantages to the brands that invest in these areas and put their customers at the center of their business. 

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