When most people think about loyalty programs, they likely think about the ones that are designed for consumers — gift cards, travel points, credit card rewards, and other perks that brands use to deepen their relationship with their members.
CarltonOne is a Canadian technology company that provides the platform powering these types of programs for roughly 200 clients in financial services, technology, automotive, healthcare, the restaurant industry and more. But the company also provides the infrastructure for loyalty programs that might sometimes get overlooked: those that are designed to recognize and reward employees.
Whether it's recognizing employees for years of service, reaching performance goals or other reasons, these programs are vital to helping companies reduce employee churn and increase engagement among their workforce, according to Melanie Corasaniti, Vice President of Client Success at CarltonOne.
“If I'm making my smoothie with that great Vitamix blender that I redeemed with my years of service credit, for example, I'm going to feel great about the place that I work every morning when I'm making my breakfast, as opposed to just getting a crystal clock or a watch, like the old way that those programs used to be run,” she said.
Finding the Story Inside the Data
A loyalty program will only work if it offers its members things they actually want, which is true both for a brand’s employees or their customers. Corasaniti believes that data is crucial to the success of a program and prioritizes helping clients understand it.
“I'm big into making sure that the data tells the story and defines what we're doing with any of the programs we're working on,” she said. “It helps us manage our clients and their businesses.”
She notes that to effectively use data when building a loyalty program, it’s important to have a question you want to answer. Brands should also use data to help them guide their decisions, not make their decisions for them.
“It's really easy to take a look at the data and go down a rabbit hole and decide that you're going to take some action, and it might not be the right action,” Corasaniti said.
Subject Matter Experts Who Care
CarltonOne has about 5,000 individual programs running different use cases among its clients, which means that it must have the flexibility to serve the breadth of these different needs. It is also a global company that can source and ship rewards locally in 190 countries, which helps to reduce costs and speed delivery. That also means local currencies, duties, taxation, warranties and even plug types are all taken care of with just one API connection.
Providing this API and platform integration gives clients the backend infrastructure they need to essentially plug into CarltonOne’s platform instead of having to build a loyalty program themselves. With clients spanning many different industries and with loyalty programs spanning numerous use cases, Corasaniti points to the importance of CarltonOne having people on the team who are subject matter experts in each of the verticals they service.
“We've got a really strong team of subject matter experts who can dive in,” she said. “And it's not just that they know their stuff, it's that they care.”
Make Something Meaningful
One of the most important ways to make sure your loyalty program works, according to Corasaniti, is for brands to know their audience. Whether it's their customers or their employees, they must know what kind of program members want to participate in.
This is especially true on the consumer side since there are so many loyalty programs in the marketplace now. Corasaniti also thinks it's important for companies to understand the damage to the brand that can happen by reducing the benefits of a rewards program for financial reasons.
“You're thinking ‘I need to reduce costs so I’m going to cut my loyalty program benefits or I'm going to devalue those points,’... and then you lose customers faster than you gain them in the first place,” she said. “You really need to carefully consider that loyalty program not to be a cost, but something that drives incremental benefits for you.”
A successful loyalty program will have both aspirational rewards and rewards that members can get right away, according to Corasaniti. The program must also be compelling enough for members to stay engaged over a longer period of time.
“It’s not build it and they will come; it’s build it and make something meaningful to them and then they will come,” she noted. “I think there’s been a shift in the loyalty industry over the past 15 years or so because of saturation and people are really choosing the programs that they want to participate in as opposed to participating in everything presented to them.”
AI Has Yet to Live Up to the Hype
According to Corasaniti, CarltonOne is currently working on several AI initiatives as it seeks to create efficiencies for rewards members and to also make rewards programs more tailored to individual preferences. The company is also leveraging AI for incremental search technology.
“Personalization and driving more engagement by putting things in front of people at the right time is what I think AI is going to do,” she said.
However, Corasaniti thinks both AI and gamification have been overhyped in the loyalty industry up to this point. With the latter, she sees it driving short-term interest, but she hasn’t seen it used effectively to drive long-term engagement and make sticky customers.
As for AI, while it could eventually transform the industry, Corasaniti has not seen that transformation happen yet.
“Everyone's talking about it, but I have yet to see solid use cases of people using AI to really drive behavior within a loyalty program,” she said.