How BJ’s Wholesale Club Builds Member Retention and Employee Engagement

Editor’s Note - This story was originally published in March's Loyalty Management Online, and is part of Loyalty360’s “Best of 2016.” We wish you and your family a happy holidays, and will return to our regular content schedule in 2017!

BJ’s Wholesale Club supports a customer experience that offers tremendous savings and a marvelous selection of products. However, that is not the only reason members are lining up to bestow one of the East Coast’s most popular warehouse clubs with their loyalty. BJ’s also provides members with a sense of exclusivity, and it inspires strong emotional connections among those who shop regularly.  

In short, BJ’s Wholesale Club is winning customer loyalty, and the strength of its brand is growing. But even so, the brand sees no reason to rest on its laurels just yet. Recently, Loyalty360 was able to speak with Adrian Sosa, BJ’s Senior VP of Membership and Analytics, about the direction of the brand, its current perceptions surrounding customer behaviors and more.  

So what are some of your new plans for customer engagement going forward?  
Sosa: One of the biggest priorities we have is customer retention. So one of the things we launched late last year was a subscription membership, which is the ability to automatically renew your membership on a personal credit card or a co-branded card. If members agree to the terms, they can basically just have their memberships renewed by having that card charged when renewal is due. We call that the Easy Renewal product, and that's a big priority because of its convenience for members. The automatic renewal also takes the dissonance out of the transaction. So with the club model today, for the most part, about 80% of the renewals are happening when members check out as a "nice” surprise. So we are taking that transaction out of the checkout lane, and making it happen automatically.  

Also, we are trying to engage first-year members in a more regimented way with a better onboarding process, and growing their breath and scope with the club. So we have some efforts that are underway for that.   How do you go about acquiring people to join the club and the loyalty program?   Sosa: We do a lot of acquisition marketing. So when I talk about Easy Renewal and pushing renewals and first-year member onboarding programs, that's a bit of rebalancing and leveraging our marketing portfolio to try and spend more on retention. 

Can you define customer loyalty for us? And what does customer loyalty mean to your organization?  
Sosa: For us, customer loyalty is a level of engagement that makes a BJ's member a raving fan. And so they talk to their neighbors about the great products and the great value that they receive from BJ's. And loyalty also means they consolidate many of their household purchases with BJ’s. Whether it's a computer, a vacation, or their weekly grocery shopping, if they do that with us, and think about us first . . .  that's what loyalty means to us.  

How do you measure customer loyalty at BJ's? And what metrics or benchmarks do you use?  
Sosa: We look at a number of things. We track things such as members’ in-club shopping experience as well as their sentiment with BJ's. So we track overall net promoter scores, we track shopping satisfaction, we track engagement with our team members (employees). So we ask if our team members are friendly. Do customers engage them and vice a versa? And we track whether or not they feel they are getting value. We track all that stuff in real-time. Every day were getting thousands of responses from our clubs through a survey that we put out there and through our member satisfaction program.  

How high of a priority is customer loyalty for BJ’s? 
Sosa
: Customer loyalty is a very high priority for us. It's part of the model because you could even argue that the whole idea of a membership club is a loyalty program. People are actually paying and investing equity before they even start shopping.  

And there is that exclusivity element to it as well, correct?   Sosa: Yes, there is an emotional connection to that access that you get. We have a pretty strong member base and they are very emotionally invested in us. The members who like us really like us. They talk about us and they give us great scores. So they are pretty passionate. And if someone uses us as his or her full shopping experience, then they really feel like they are taking care their family. They feel good when they leave a wholesale club and they stock the shelves for their family and home in a way that was smart and in a way that saved them money. We hear that often in the responses that we get from our members.

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