For Pierre Bourbonniére, the Chief Marketing Officer of North America’s fourth-largest public transit organization, Société de transport de Montréal (STM), the highly successful Merci loyalty program has taught him many useful lessons about customer loyalty.
“The biggest challenge is to provide continuous improvements, new features, new benefits, and new excitement so that customers don’t get bored and decide to disconnect,” he told Loyalty360. “Relevance and value delivered to the consumer through the application drives adoption and usage, thus frequency of ridership and, ultimately, loyalty.”
The STM Merci loyalty program garnered two awards at the inaugural Loyalty360 Awards held in March at the 7th Annual Loyalty Expo, presented by Loyalty360 – The Loyalty Marketer’s Association.
The program, powered by STM Merci, a mobile app that rewards STM’s 1.3 million daily riders, earned the following two awards: Best Customer Experience & Engagement, Gold Winner Best Technology in Loyalty Marketing, Silver Winner.
Bourbonniére said a whopping 65% of Montrealers uses public transit every day and STM’s main goal is to retain its customers. The program launched in May 2013 and quickly gained traction, attracting excellent reaction on Facebook and Twitter, along with a front page article in the Wall Street Journal.
Bourbonniére said the initial pilot phase opened the new service to 20,000 customers that has now grown to 2.5 million.
STM launched the Opus Smart Card a few years back. Opus is a smart card on which riders can charge all STM transit fares. It’s rechargeable and contactless so it much easier for riders to use.
Bourbonniére said STM was looking at creative options to leverage this asset to generate additional fare and non-fare revenues, change purchasing behaviors, and generate off-peak travel. As customers register into the STM Merci mobile application, they are prompted to enter their Opus card number and answer additional questions about profile and interests.
At this point, STM Merci can speak to them individually and provide them with the right product/service/information at the right time and at the right place throughout the day. The service not only provides information and incentives relative to transportation, but also a wealth of information and personalized offers on cultural events, shows, sporting events, and shopping.
Since the Merci program launched, Bourbonniére explained the new customer insights STM has gleaned.
“Value delivered to the consumer through the application drives adoption and usage,” he said. “This observation highlights the importance of the ecosystem of partner and merchants providing the special offers. Acquisition cost can be kept relatively low based on the power of word of mouth. This type of application can go viral. The wide range of click-through from one offer to another indicates mobile interactions are fundamentally different than web interactions.”
He said STM is planning a multichannel approach, integrating web and mobile in terms of content management to increase overall value delivered to the consumer, convenience, and impact on the business.