Kobie Marketing celebrated its 25th anniversary this year and, for company President Michael Hemsey, that is a huge milestone.
Loyalty marketing, customer engagement, customer experience, and brand loyalty have come a long way during that time. Hemsey sat down with Loyalty360 to discuss those topics in a scintillating interview.
What does the 25th anniversary of the company mean to you and Kobie Marketing?
It has been a privilege for me to lead Kobie Marketing, collaborate with our growing team, and drive our company forward over the past eight years. Kobie is committed to delivering exceptional customer experiences to both our clients and their customers, and all of our successes come from all the great people that work at Kobie to accomplish that vision. After 25 years, it’s inspiring to say to our clients and our growing team that we are still just getting started.
Over the years we have and will continue to operate on these guiding principles:
Enterprise: When a loyalty and customer experience mindset pervades an organization, the program goes far beyond a retention tactic or a packaged program owned by marketing. The loyalty initiative is embraced by the entire company – across product and service offerings, partners, employees, through an omni-channel marketing lens.
Experience & Engagement: Creating ‘Moments That Matter’ means being able to engage consumers in a personalized, one-to-one fashion at every applicable channel with an appropriate message and interaction opportunity. The end state is to create the framework for reciprocal, and meaningful, customer-brand relationships.
Enabling Technology: Implementing an automated and flexible loyalty program requires enabling technology to make your concurrent loyalty strategies and promotional campaigns work seamlessly and effectively. Your platform has to scale as your membership grows and the channels with which your members interact expand. Social, mobile, local, contextual, all data sets and all digital playgrounds are part and parcel of the required technology footprint.
Economics: Only measurable, incremental results matter. Your program should be the engine for these results and allow the marketing, product , operations and finance teams to track success metrics based on a sound economic and financial model. These financial and reporting processes need to be supported by easy-to-access, quality data and contextual insights.
Execution: The most important thing to remember when executing a loyalty program is to drive continuous improvements into the program. Customers have a lifecycle with your brand, and the loyalty program(s) you offer to your customers have their own lifecycle. The programs require the same amount of consistent innovation and planning to remain relevant and vibrant to your customers.
How do you see the customer loyalty industry changing and what are you doing to help drive that change?
The loyalty industry continues to evolve toward an increasing focus on delivering an impactful customer experience through every channel. As a result, Kobie has evolved our products offerings (agency and customer experience services coupled with business intelligence and analytics) to allow our clients to create any customer experience they wish, founded in the insights from the data. Kobie strives to help our clients continue to raise the customer experience “bar” and further differentiate their member experience.
Our product roadmap evolves to meet our client’s needs and the needs of the changing marketplace. We help companies handle end-to-end marketing campaigns that address customers’ communication preferences, while combining offers or opportunities for engagement in ways that benefit both the customer and the company in a financially responsible way. Our marketing campaign management system addresses the need for greater personalization, coordination, and allows our clients to run literally hundreds of campaigns concurrently, mapped exactly to their segmentation and one-to-one strategies.
How would you describe the state of loyalty marketing today?
The focus on loyalty marketers and their vendors is to execute flawlessly by integrating across channels and devices. The industry continues to need leading technology to manage customer interactions, like that offered by Kobie through our platform, Alchemy®. I think, more specifically, that the programs that make up our industry are in a healthy state of change – reflective of their lifecycle. Brand updates and marketing refreshes of voice; transparent consumer friendly rules of engagement; smarter points and liability management; personalized and expanding channels of interaction – are all part of this current evolution in our industry’s thinking.
What loyalty trends do you see down the road?
Kobie is seeing a focus on managing complex and varied, personalized customer interactions. Loyalty marketers need a unique technology platform that can integrate customer data with every aspect of the loyalty program design, from points, rewards, and segment/campaign creation to messaging, real-time decisioning, customer service, and analytics.
In response to these marketplace needs, Kobie has built a marketing campaign management system that addresses the need for greater personalization and coordination. Our Alchemy Marketing Platform (AMP) is currently driving an external shift to allow both flexibility and personalization in loyalty marketing. Alchemy Marketing Platform allows users to configure omni-channel communications and marry them with smart earnings and business rules. Our goal was to provide greater flexibility in CRM and loyalty campaigns, backed by a scalable and lightning fast decision engine. Marketers can now manage and configure multiple consumer moments, using various levels of data access and cross-platform functionality.
There will always be a need for greater insights, founded in data, which will allow marketers to create more compelling customer experiences. This is an area we will continue to focus and build more robust client solutions.
What are you most proud of?
I am proud of our client relationships and the team of people at Kobie who create this great culture, day in and day out. As one of our clients said to us: “We deliver a market leading technology platform, but with a high-touch agency feel.”
Our goal is to have a locked-in understanding of our client’s business, their organizational priorities, and a mastery of all aspects of the program(s) they entrust us to manage. We strive to deliver the best customer experience to our clients, and their customers.