During his session at least week’s 8th annual Loyalty Expo presented by Loyalty360 – The Loyalty Marketers’ Association, Loyalty360 CEO and CMO Mark Johnson told attendees that there is enormous potential in the customer loyalty journey.
According to The 2015 Loyalty Landscape Report, the state of customer loyalty has everything to do with the customer journey.
“New tools, technologies, and techniques that promise to win the hearts, minds, and wallets of customers are being introduced at a rapid pace,” Johnson said in the report. “It seems the scope of customer loyalty strategy is expanding just as rapidly. This ‘scope creep’ is causing marketers to see the enormous potential of the customer loyalty journey and re-think the role of their loyalty programs in the grand scheme of loyalty marketing. Sure, loyalty programs are still a critical component of the loyalty strategy and can make a big impact on the business when done correctly, but many industries are saturated with programs that aren’t differentiated.”
While today’s customers are savvy and have a wealth of “always on” information at their fingertips to guide decisions, the promise of earning points is no longer enough to entice them to stay, Johnson said.
“Marketers know this and are expanding their loyalty strategies to include disciplines and mechanisms that happen along the entire customer journey,” the report notes. “But as with most change and growth, come 
challenges.”
Loyalty, Johnson said, is now touching multiple parts of the organization, making it more difficult to manage, monitor, and measure. More technologies and techniques available–often unproven−also create more uncertainty among senior-level decision-makers about the best strategy to take.
“So while marketers are approaching customer loyalty in a way that more accurately reflects how the consumer makes decisions and behaves along the entire journey, the complexity of this new and expanded approach reveals business gaps that can act as roadblocks to truly building customer loyalty,” Johnson said in the report. “Our Loyalty Landscape report comes from listening to brands and hearing the need for a true understanding of the current and future states of customer loyalty. In this second annual study, we are hearing an even greater need for more clarity in metrics, benchmarks and understanding the level of strategic importance that brands are placing on loyalty.”
The results of the study highlight an even greater need to listen, hear, and understand. That’s why Loyalty360 embarked on a new Loyalty Metric study–a first-of-its kind report that will allow brands to understand the return on investment and benchmarks for their loyalty programs.
“In this age of ‘big data’ we hear often about the importance of and potential for ‘understanding the customer,’’’ Johnson said in the report. “Yet as a true understanding of the customer has revealed new techniques for building relationships with them, our Loyalty Landscape study has shown that marketers are now looking for a true “understanding of the impact.”