According to a new white paper, "Leveraging Loyalty Data to Enhance the Customer Experience," many competitive companies are changing their approach to loyalty programs, based on new customer expectations.
Customer needs have always been a high priority for competitive sales organizations, but are you equipped to inspire long-term loyalty among your most valuable customers? It's no secret that the wants and needs of today's multichannel, social customers have become more intense than ever. At a minimum, customers expect
In the white paper, industry experts Don Peppers, Founding Partner of Peppers & Rogers Group, and Melissa Boxer, Vice President of CRM Products Marketing and Loyalty Solutions at Oracle Corporation, say that sales leaders need to leverage integrated CRM systems and data in order to forge stronger bonds with customers and cement long-term loyalty. The goal is to use touchpoints to deliver a "unified, personalized, and relevant customer experience."
For example, Peppers describes his personal experience using Amazon.com to drive home the importance of cultivating an environment of trust: after clicking to purchase a book, Peppers received an automatic message notifying him that he had already bought that particular title. The message asked him to confirm that he wanted to buy another copy of the book.
"Now, here's the difference between ordinary trustworthiness and what [Peppers & Rogers cofounder] Martha Rogers and I call extreme trust, or trustability," says Peppers. "It wouldn't have been untrustworthy for Amazon simply to sell me the book I was ready to order; it wasn't Amazon's mistake, it was my mistake. And I wouldn't have considered the company to be dishonest in any way if it simply sent me a book that I ordered by mistake. But because of the data Amazon has access to, it was able to help me avoid making a mistake. Its database's memory of our past transactions was obviously better than mine. Amazon used that to gain my trust."
Your loyalty program should be using data to put structure around these kinds of customer touchpoints, say Peppers and Boxer. In this way, you can bring all your resources – sales, marketing, and customer service – to support customers and keep them happy. You can also start to segment customers and see from whom you're getting the most value. Peppers acknowledges that not all customers are created equal.
"Some customers are worth more, some are worth less," he says. "But to truly treat different customers differently, you have to treat each customer in a way that reflects everything you know about that customer. You want to be able to optimize your business around one customer at a time – not around the average customer, but around each different customer."
Customer needs have always been a high priority for competitive sales organizations, but are you equipped to inspire long-term loyalty among your most valuable customers? It's no secret that the wants and needs of today's multichannel, social customers have become more intense than ever. At a minimum, customers expect
- higher levels of trust from companies and sellers,
- more benefits (for the same price),
- a better and deeper understanding of their needs, and
- quicker turnaround on questions and deliverables.
In the white paper, industry experts Don Peppers, Founding Partner of Peppers & Rogers Group, and Melissa Boxer, Vice President of CRM Products Marketing and Loyalty Solutions at Oracle Corporation, say that sales leaders need to leverage integrated CRM systems and data in order to forge stronger bonds with customers and cement long-term loyalty. The goal is to use touchpoints to deliver a "unified, personalized, and relevant customer experience."
For example, Peppers describes his personal experience using Amazon.com to drive home the importance of cultivating an environment of trust: after clicking to purchase a book, Peppers received an automatic message notifying him that he had already bought that particular title. The message asked him to confirm that he wanted to buy another copy of the book.
"Now, here's the difference between ordinary trustworthiness and what [Peppers & Rogers cofounder] Martha Rogers and I call extreme trust, or trustability," says Peppers. "It wouldn't have been untrustworthy for Amazon simply to sell me the book I was ready to order; it wasn't Amazon's mistake, it was my mistake. And I wouldn't have considered the company to be dishonest in any way if it simply sent me a book that I ordered by mistake. But because of the data Amazon has access to, it was able to help me avoid making a mistake. Its database's memory of our past transactions was obviously better than mine. Amazon used that to gain my trust."
Your loyalty program should be using data to put structure around these kinds of customer touchpoints, say Peppers and Boxer. In this way, you can bring all your resources – sales, marketing, and customer service – to support customers and keep them happy. You can also start to segment customers and see from whom you're getting the most value. Peppers acknowledges that not all customers are created equal.
"Some customers are worth more, some are worth less," he says. "But to truly treat different customers differently, you have to treat each customer in a way that reflects everything you know about that customer. You want to be able to optimize your business around one customer at a time – not around the average customer, but around each different customer."
– Curated from Selling Power Editors
