Larry Davis, Vice President of Marketing for jewelry and gifts merchant Ross-Simons, sat down with Loyalty360 to discuss a plethora of topics related to customer loyalty, customer experience, engagement, and technology.
Davis participated in an engaging Q&A with Loyalty360.
How do you define loyalty, what does it mean to your organization, and how has it changed in recent years?
That a customer elects to shop a brand as a first choice and the experience with that brand continuously reinforces the election. Repeat buyers are our best friend. Our loyalty quotients are amazingly stable. You can’t please all the customers and some will disengage through no fault at all because they are just 1x buyers. Great buyers continue to shop in the same percentages and their repeat purchases are increasing.
How has the strategy and focus changed in recent years?
The web is the biggest wrinkle in the overall brand loyalty picture–where a customer who is shopping on price or shopping for a specific item through a search engine doesn’t evince the same loyalty as a retail customer or catalog customer who finds nirvana by browsing and self-selecting.
What does Customer Experience/Customer Engagement mean to your organization, and how has it changed over recent years or since you have been on the job?
Customer experience has become much more holistic for us. It used to just be the call center experience, but now it has morphed into a complete picture of building loyalty by increasing touches through direct, social, and call center–and providing customers with a unified expectation of the brand experience.
What are the biggest challenges and opportunities in the next two years?
Finding new customers and getting them started on our brand experience. Customers may be more skeptical of the initial transaction as there are more and more competitors who have the opportunity to scream on the Web, or the opportunity to find customers through niches on the Web.
Marketers are tasked to be more data-centric than ever before, yet the challenge of creating actionable insight from data is more challenging than before. What is your advice for marketers?
Take big data with a grain of salt. It probably doesn’t matter that you know the dog’s name when you are sending out an offer for Kibble. But it might help to know your prospect’s spouse’s name when you sell them a new stock offer.
Can you offer our audience a high level overview of your customer philosophy and share how this perspective helps drive more effective engagement and better marketing outcomes?
Treat your best customers best. In other words, if you try to give your worst customers a better offer than you give your best customers, you aren’t being fair to the folks who matter.
What role does technology play in your customer engagement, experience, and loyalty efforts?
The dump-truck school of marketing will never die, but at least the dump trucks are getting smarter through technology.