When Paul Flemr is asked about the advice that he would give brands looking to improve their customer loyalty experience strategy, the Senior Vice President of Incentive Marketing Solutions at Group O has a simple message for them.
“Engage with passion and purpose,” Flemr said.
The way Flemr sees it, engagement is the strength of loyalty, the thing that will drive the program’s success. This requires brands knowing their end goals and objectives and building that engagement into the base of their loyalty program.
Although Group O offers support for specific needs clients have with their loyalty programs, the company especially prides itself on being an end-to-end solution provider for clients who need a more hands-on approach. This includes everything from program design and development to implementation and ongoing execution, and then ultimately fulfillment and customer care throughout the life of the loyalty program.
“We're acknowledged by many of our current clients and those that we speak to in the market as really providing the gold standard of care and concierge-level servicing, whether that's our client stakeholders, the customers themselves, or the participants in the program,” Flemr said. “Ultimately, we've built that reputation around being able to take care of all needs.”
Engage and Delight
One of the requests Group O has been hearing from clients this year is not only how they can engage customers—especially digitally—but also how they can delight them. These are essentially dueling priorities that can be challenging to balance, according to Flemr.
“In some cases, you may be asking them to make additional investments, maybe to earn a specific reward from a loyalty standpoint,” he said. “They may have to upgrade a service category within their purchases, or they may have to buy additional products, and those are the behaviors you want to influence. But to do that, you've got to find other ways to delight them, so make the reward at the end of it something that's worthwhile.”
One of the enhancements Group O's clients have been particularly interested in this year is integrating loyalty directly into the sales process. Brands want to introduce rewards at the point of sale, showing customers that additional benefits are available and that their continued engagement will be rewarded.
“We encourage a lot of cross functionality here and cross training,” Flemr said. “Bring in your acquisition and sales channels, help them understand what your needs are on the loyalty side and vice versa. That'll help us in guiding and directing you and strategizing on best methods to put that environment in place.”
More than a Commodity
Flemr notes that in the past, customer loyalty was seen as something more akin to a commodity or simply a marketing function. But today it is more of a cross-functional discipline that requires a mix of strategy to build strong and sustained loyalty engagement.
Group O is focused on helping clients achieve a business outcome by taking whatever elements the client wants in the market—such as incentives or rewards—and strategizing around them. This includes utilizing data, analytics, and insights that provide real-time feedback, allowing clients to make pivots and adjustments to the program to ensure that they meet the market demands.
“There are higher expectations, I think, in general from customers and consumers alike around personalization,” Flemr said. “They want real-time engagement and ultimately instant gratification. It's more immediate and a lot of that has to do with the digital environments in which customers engage in.”
Brands are also seeing that customers want flexibility when choosing rewards, which makes it critical to have multiple offerings within a loyalty program, Flemr notes. Customer segmentation within the data is also important because lifestyle needs can differ by factors such as demographics or marketplace, making it incumbent for brands to have a deep understanding of their customer base.
Knowing what’s important to customers, not just in terms of your brand, but in terms of their lifestyle, can help guide the offerings that are put in the program.
“You can't be afraid to make changes within those programs as those things evolve,” Flemr said. “We've seen economic conditions change pretty drastically in the last several years, and I know different brands have responded in different ways to that, and they tout it in their marketing efforts to say we're doing this in response to these conditions.”
He sees this response as being a positive one, but reiterates the importance of brands using segmented data, so they don't put all loyalty members in the same bucket. What works for one member may not work for another, which is why flexibility within the program is crucial.
Staying One Step Ahead
Flemr points out that people’s loyalty to a brand can be driven by the simplest thing, and brands need to be prepared to notice how customer sentiment towards their brand has changed. This requires staying one step ahead of their competitors, the marketplace, the economy, or any factor that can affect loyalty quickly and at unexpected times.
Any of these shifts could lead Group O to change its recommendations to clients, whether it's adjusting to elements within their platform, what they redoing in the market, or some of the customer messaging and customer care that they're providing.
“It's really critical that you be prepared for those things and have ways that you can pivot quickly as an incentive marketer so customers still feel like they're being cared for and that they're getting the attention and the personalization that they've wanted and demanded,” Flemr said.