Communication’s significance within the larger customer experience puzzle cannot be overstated. Simply put, effective brand communication is among the most crucial factors in fostering engagement with consumers. This is the goal for LoyaltyEdge, the loyalty solution division of financial institution American Express.
“What we’ve found in formulating our customer experience, is that we’re not able to slot our consumers into one type; rather, we look at the customers of our loyalty clients, and the ways in which they fulfill their customers’ needs,” Jennifer Smith, Director of Platform Strategy & Development at LoyaltyEdge, said during a session at the recent Forrester CXNY 2016 Conference. “However, our clients elect to do that is easily transacted from our end, because our mentality is that there isn’t just one solution that will work for all customers.”
These LoyaltyEdge Clients include Barclaycard, one of the largest credit card companies in the world. As an example of this LoyaltyEdge-driven segmentation, Jackie Galaida, Barclaycard U.S. VP of Loyalty Marketing, noted one of its most famous partners: The National Football League.
“When we work with the NFL, we base our materials on each fan’s affiliated team, that’s pretty easy!” Galaida continued, “The tougher ones are brands like Carnival Cruises, because there’s such a wide variety of people who love cruises. We’re catering to young families all the way up to older couples, and we need to find a way to satisfy all these customers and provide what they’re looking for out of the program.”
The variety of these programs, combined with the process of transferring these bonus points to the partner’s own loyalty program, results in a veritable mountain of data. This immense amount of information is an invaluable resource in creating customer experience, but only with proper organization and analysis.
“The big data issue is one that really has to be a collaborative effort. It’s not easy to find a way to track an individual across all platforms while allowing us to collect as much data as we can, filter that information back to Barclaycard, and use it to form a more complete picture of that shopper,” said Smith. “In terms of working with our partners, the key is being nimble; the process that we use with Barclaycard certainly isn’t the same as we’d use with Delta, and another part of the challenge is determining which pieces of data are most important to the specific client.”
Effective data collection and analysis is a tall task for all companies, across all industries. Why then, are these organizations determined to face the challenge head on? The answer can be summed up in one word: personalization. By using the data companies now have at their disposal, they’re able to unlock the potential of knowing a customer, fulfilling their individual needs, and doing so in a way that is entirely seamless and unobtrusive to the customer experience. This is the goal of every brand, and it can only be reached by designing loyalty offerings that create these 360-degree customer perspectives.