Latest / Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360 / Loyalty360 Loyalty Live | Sam Panzer, Talon.One
Transcript
- 0:03Mark Johnson: Good afternoon, good morning.
- 0:03Mark Johnson: It's Mark Johnson from Loyalty 360.
- 0:05Mark Johnson: Hope everyone's happy, safe and well.
- 0:06Mark Johnson: I want to welcome you to another edition of Loyalty Live.
- 0:09Mark Johnson: In this series we speak with leaders in customer channel and brand loyalty about the technology trends and best practices that drive customer engagement and impact customer loyalty.
- 0:18Mark Johnson: Our guests provide tactical solutions at expert advice on building and maintaining customer relationships.
- 0:24Mark Johnson: Today we have Sam Panzer, who's the director of industry strategy, Talon.
- 0:29Mark Johnson: One, and we're going to be talking about the 2024 trends in customer loyalty and some of the opportunities that he is seeing within his organization, Talon.
- 0:39Mark Johnson: One, from the brand side.
- 0:41Mark Johnson: So, Sam, thank you very much for talking with us.
- 0:44Mark Johnson: Great to have you here today.
- 0:47Sam Panzer: Thanks, Mark, excited to be here.
- 0:49Mark Johnson: Perfect.
- 0:50Mark Johnson: So, first off, for those who may not know, we'd like to start these on a more personal level.
- 0:54Mark Johnson: So we would love to know a little bit more about yourself, your current role Talon.
- 0:58Mark Johnson: One and maybe a little bit about your background.
- 1:01Sam Panzer: Yeah, sure so.
- 1:02Sam Panzer: Talon.
- 1:02Sam Panzer: One we're a loyalty and promotions engine for brands, so we really are kind of focused on the evaluation of incentives, be that through loyalty rewards and challenges, tiers and all that, or just kind of general promotions.
- 1:12Sam Panzer: Working with brands like Adidas, Ticketmaster, Eddie Bauer, Fanduel, Harry Rosen on their incentive strategy.
- 1:20Sam Panzer: So focused on bringing in customer data, session data, all these kind of different streams of data to evaluate personalized, targeted incentives in a loyalty or promotional context.
- 1:30Sam Panzer: I lead our value practice, though we do some strategy work with our customers and lots around kind of program modeling, ROI, anything, business value.
- 1:39Sam Panzer: I love to get really geeky with our customers about.
- 1:44Mark Johnson: Okay great.
- 1:44Mark Johnson: And for those who may not be familiar, can you give us a brief overview of Talon.
- 1:48Mark Johnson: One, what you guys do, how you do it with brands you work with?
- 1:51Mark Johnson: It'd be great to know.
- 1:54Sam Panzer: Yeah, I mean we work with a couple different industries.
- 1:58Sam Panzer: Retail and fashion is one of our biggest ones.
- 2:00Sam Panzer: We'll just kind of give a case on that where we focus on bringing in different data about customers, items, anything in the session etc.
- 2:09Sam Panzer: And then evaluating what's like the right offer to get to that customer to motivate them to do what you want them to do.
- 2:14Sam Panzer: So it's a lot of a lot around, kind of you know what's like the minimum amount we need to invest to change the customer's behavior.
- 2:21Sam Panzer: So it's like we have a rules-based approach to building promotional incentives could be like a loyal challenge.
- 2:26Sam Panzer: If it's the member of this tier and their lifetime value is here and they haven't purchased it in three months, then let's give them an offer on a category that we know they like or try and nudge them to try a new category Could also be rewarding them for taking different actions, like sharing data with the brand or those kinds of things.
- 2:44Sam Panzer: Yeah, I mean that's kind of the short of.
- 2:47Sam Panzer: It is like the engine.
- 2:48Sam Panzer: To evaluate that and to bring in different data and to evaluate that in real time is really, really important to us.
- 2:54Sam Panzer: So work with a lot of really strong, you know leaders and customer loyalty and promotion, especially so Sephora, adidas, dominoes, river Islands, devinums, to name a couple, but 250 enterprise customers around the globe.
- 3:12Mark Johnson: Excellent.
- 3:12Mark Johnson: Over the last 12 months we've seen within our community, the growing brand community, that brands are looking to change and enhance their customer loyalty efforts, either by adding functionality, changing program structures or enhancing or changing the benefits.
- 3:28Mark Johnson: Is this?
- 3:29Mark Johnson: Something that you are seeing with in your audience and, if so, what are your clients most focused on?
- 3:35Mark Johnson: Changing or adapting?
- 3:37Sam Panzer: Yeah, I think the space just keeps getting smarter.
- 3:39Sam Panzer: For the last 10 years or so, the technology has been so good that basically loyalty is a ballgame that any brand can play, from your corner coffee shop to obviously the biggest brands have been doing it for decades and in that really competitive market there's been a lot of programs that have launched just because it was kind of a cool, trendy thing to do.
- 4:01Sam Panzer: And now what I'd say we're seeing is really like a rationalization of benefits, with brands getting a lot smarter on what is loyal behavior and being more focused on rewarding.
- 4:11Sam Panzer: That Sounds really basic, but I do think that sometimes, yeah, programs launch because it sounded like a good project to do.
- 4:18Sam Panzer: That could drive a little bit of incremental value.
- 4:20Sam Panzer: But I think you've seen a lot of like scattershot programs that just give like a perpetual liability to every customer that signs up.
- 4:28Sam Panzer: Be a bit more precise and kind of naming these are the behaviors that we define as loyal.
- 4:32Sam Panzer: That's sharing data, purchasing, cross category.
- 4:36Sam Panzer: Like Delta's had a really kind of a bit of turbulence around there.
- 4:39Sam Panzer: That changed to SkyMiles this year, but I think they're kind of great example of like.
- 4:44Sam Panzer: For a long time, basically anybody who flew Delta with any regularity, got some pretty good value from the program and this year they announced some changes for 2025 that some of them they rolled back.
- 4:53Sam Panzer: But the gist is really, for us, loyal behavior booking your hotel, booking a car and flying very regularly and preferably in in premium classes, upsetting a lot of more casual travelers who who aren't doing all those things.
- 5:07Sam Panzer: But it's an example of how brands are getting clear about no.
- 5:10Sam Panzer: For us, like, loyal behavior is really doing the whole kit and caboodle if you travel through Delta and that's what we're going to reward through our program, not like the people like me who fly a couple of times a year in in, yeah, in steerage class.
- 5:24Mark Johnson: Excellent I mean.
- 5:24Mark Johnson: What program changes, enhancements do you think brands should be most focused on in 24?
- 5:29Sam Panzer: Yeah, I think they're two.
- 5:30Sam Panzer: So that kind of mind for us most often.
- 5:32Sam Panzer: The first is that how does the loyalty program support the firm's data strategy?
- 5:37Sam Panzer: So loyalty programs obviously are a great vehicle for both collecting and using zero and first party data.
- 5:43Sam Panzer: This changes that have been underway in terms of like third party cookies and stuff.
- 5:49Sam Panzer: So by the end of next year, Google Chrome will phase out 99% of the third party cookies.
- 5:54Sam Panzer: So basically, third party data is just becoming more expensive and less, less usable.
- 5:58Sam Panzer: So then what affirms you?
- 6:00Sam Panzer: Obviously they need to.
- 6:01Sam Panzer: They need to collect and kind of manage their own estate in terms of customer data.
- 6:07Sam Panzer: Loyalty programs are just a really good vehicle to collect that, obviously, to understand, have a higher share of customers who are registered and logged in, to be able to reward customers for sharing data with the brand, filling out preference centers or surveys, those kinds of things, and then to actually put that to use by having enough data where you can market to the user on more of a one to one basis.
- 6:28Sam Panzer: So I'd say that maybe like the most noteworthy change in the last three to four years it's really feels like it's accelerating to next year is what's the data strategy of the company and how is the loyalty program helping the brand get towards this idea of, like, data, completeness?
- 6:42Sam Panzer: I'm sure that most brands have a long term goal around, like you know, AI strategy and all that but to do that, you need good data, and I think that loyalty programs really get advancing, you know, advancing towards that.
- 6:52Sam Panzer: And the second one keep this brief is just the idea of being really smart about your investment into the customer Economy has been really challenging the last 18 months, though more scrutiny and more focused on being efficient with anything you're passing back to customers through accreditation spend and retention spend.
- 7:10Mark Johnson: When you look at measurement, measurement is very important.
- 7:13Mark Johnson: The economy's got to change, a little more challenging in some areas than others.
- 7:19Mark Johnson: But when brands make these changes, how should they define and measure success after making these enhancements or changes to the loyalty program?
- 7:27Sam Panzer: Yeah, I mean I'd say I help our customers both with like the initial ROI program models and then also like quantifying the improvement to your program.
- 7:36Sam Panzer: And it's almost easier to like measure improvements to things rather than quantifying the value in the first place.
- 7:42Sam Panzer: But I think you know kind of alluded to this already but this that there's there's been a shift happening of moving from from what you call like a passive earn and burn, like static program where everybody's getting the same benefits, and then more towards a more personalized, targeted direction.
- 7:59Sam Panzer: As you make that improvement.
- 8:00Sam Panzer: That means you're going to have more, you know, like micro moments with customers, so different permutations of offers, different activations.
- 8:09Sam Panzer: You try there's going to be kind of more of a dense calendar of like different things that are going out to the customer.
- 8:14Sam Panzer: So as that vehicle becomes moves from like this kind of passive model towards a more active, you know, iterative, get marketing vehicle for the brand.
- 8:22Sam Panzer: You have more opportunities to measure individual activations or attempts within that.
- 8:28Sam Panzer: So I think a big thing that we try and work through with our customers is how do you take some of the, the modeling that you might see more in like campaign level attribution and marketing attribution of like individual offers and move that into like your loyalty context to see what are all the different things we're trying and then kind of measuring the impact of each of those experiment, experiments or activations.
- 8:49Mark Johnson: Okay, brands tell us pretty consistently that they want to stand out from their competition and then differentiate their customer loyalty strategies, customer experience offerings.
- 8:58Mark Johnson: But there's this quote unquote, see of sameness.
- 9:01Mark Johnson: We've seen it for a couple of years now when it comes to customer loyalty or rewards programs and strategies.
- 9:06Mark Johnson: Is this something you're seeing?
- 9:09Sam Panzer: Yeah, yeah, definitely, and a big probably.
- 9:12Sam Panzer: You know, majority of our customers are in retail and in fashion, which is like a really mature space and loyalty.
- 9:17Sam Panzer: I think back to when I was yeah, when I was growing up like Kohl's rolled up, rolled up the Kohl's cash thing in like 2004, which is, you know, kind of a loyalty program, cashback scheme, whatever.
- 9:28Sam Panzer: But I feel like there's been like 20 years of pretty steady growth in like retail loyalty especially.
- 9:35Sam Panzer: And I think if you look at like the NRF's top 100 list, it's like 90, 90, some 90% I think have a loyalty program and then the rest are like Amazon and Apple and kind of ones that you can get that don't have a explicit loyalty program.
- 9:48Sam Panzer: I think it's just it is so busy in retail especially so there's really no room to differentiate just by having a loyalty program.
- 9:59Sam Panzer: It's probably not really going to move behavior in a way that it might have a couple of years ago and it was just less crowded.
- 10:07Mark Johnson: When you look at brands who are looking to enhance their offerings, are there, what are two things that you would recommend to them that they should consider when they're looking to?
- 10:15Mark Johnson: You know, increase the efficacy or impact of the programs.
- 10:18Sam Panzer: Yeah, I think I mean I guess I really am a big believer in like being able to measure the effectiveness of individual things you try in the context of the program and in terms of like differentiating.
- 10:30Sam Panzer: I think that obviously, anything your program does that you should really kind of like accentuate.
- 10:36Sam Panzer: What are the values of the brand and like what's kind of the lifestyle that your brand is helping your customers achieve as much as possible.
- 10:44Sam Panzer: So one just to call an example of a custom relaunch this year it's Harry Rosen's luxury menswear, menswear, clothier, and they have their Club Harry program which they relaunched with us this year, and I think Club Harry does a good job of like bringing some of the brand to life in a loyalty program that still has points and tiers and kind of you know more predictable behavior from retail loyalty program, but the benefits really kind of call the life Okay, harry Rosen stuff is really high quality menswear.
- 11:14Sam Panzer: So first of all there's like alterations and repairs are part of the program that you get, you know, free alterations and then for your pairs for the next year, but the top tier, what I really like is because their ideal customer is very likely to be kind of a business traveler who has premium status with their airline.
- 11:28Sam Panzer: The benefits in Club Harry look similar to that where you can transfer points to friends and family or you can give status to a couple of to think up to five people at their top tier.
- 11:39Sam Panzer: So you know, I think it brings like, brings to life like this, this, I don't know, like culture of like of high end business traveler.
- 11:48Sam Panzer: That's a likely kind of you know, frequent fit for the brand.
- 11:50Sam Panzer: So I think, like the exact benefits vary a lot, but really kind of being true to okay, what's the lifestyle around your brand and what are your customers, what's actually differentiating in your brand, and finding a way to kind of like, highlight that, underscore it with the program.
- 12:06Mark Johnson: Excellent.
- 12:06Mark Johnson: Privacy is another area of growing concern for brand members, with regard to both things they see in the US, as well as in Europe and abroad.
- 12:18Mark Johnson: When you look at some of the legislated and corporate challenges that brands have, what are you seeing in regard to privacy, in regard to impacts or challenges brands maybe haven't?
- 12:33Sam Panzer: Yeah, we're a German company, so a lot of our customers and most of our businesses is in the US and we're also after Vapack, but our entire research and development team is still in Berlin, Germany.
- 12:43Sam Panzer: So we're baptized in data privacy because Germans take that really, really seriously and obviously, starting with GDPR and continuing with some new stuff this year, data privacy in Europe has been a lot stricter, so I think we pay a lot of attention to I would say that most of the changes in the US are coming from private entities, so from the very large online platforms, the browsers, operating systems and the use of third-party data and tracking.
- 13:13Sam Panzer: So that feels like that's been a more impactful meal that's moved in the US versus government action.
- 13:20Sam Panzer: So I don't know.
- 13:22Sam Panzer: The trend line's clear that there's always some back and forth of exactly what the changes are and when they're coming, but it does kind of get back to this idea of things need to be built on consensual marketing relationship where you're transparently collecting and using customer data in a way where the customer knows what's going on, what they're sharing, why it's being shared, what it's going to be used for, and I don't know unless you.
- 13:47Sam Panzer: Yeah, Lloyd's Program is really kind of where that shines, because it's a chance to ask for that in kind of a really clear way and have a clear value proposition associated with sharing that.
- 13:59Mark Johnson: Excellent.
- 14:00Mark Johnson: When you look at some of the challenges or opportunities brands have with regard to customer loyalty, what do you think the biggest mistake brands make is regarding their customer loyalty efforts?
- 14:12Sam Panzer: Yeah, I think being really clear again about what loyal behavior really is for the brands and modeling out different ways your customers will react to the benefits that you give.
- 14:23Sam Panzer: So I think it always sounds so basic to say that, but I don't know.
- 14:27Sam Panzer: You should really kind of have a clear assumption of exactly how the loyal program is going to change behavior.
- 14:34Sam Panzer: So is that increasing your basket size, increasing frequency, improving sentiments so customers refer more people in those kinds of things, and being a lot more clear-eyed about that other than just saying that we think this will boost general customer I don't know needs to kind of have a really clear thesis of exactly how the program will drive revenue and kind of having a pretty focused list of the outcomes the program will drive.
- 14:59Sam Panzer: I think sometimes loyalty programs are launched purely as a brand activation, almost because they feel like it's something missing in their arsenal for the brand.
- 15:11Sam Panzer: We don't have a loyalty program, so launch a program.
- 15:13Sam Panzer: We don't really kind of think exactly about what are the different levers.
- 15:17Sam Panzer: It's more true for kind of smaller brands.
- 15:18Sam Panzer: Obviously, enterprise can be a bit more mature on that.
- 15:21Sam Panzer: So I think being really really outcome driven and being as specific as you can about the outcomes you're trying to drive is probably like the most important foundational thing that brands occasionally will miss.
- 15:34Mark Johnson: So, when you look at how rewards may be challenging, changing, they're also challenging as well.
- 15:40Mark Johnson: There's a movement towards more personalized rewards that we continue to see here, whether it's content or product offers, or both in service offerings for even B2B clients.
- 15:51Mark Johnson: What are you seeing with regard to brands who are focusing on enhancing the reward offers that brands have incentives from a customer value proposition?
- 16:03Sam Panzer: Yeah, I think I mean there's definitely like a huge push towards more experiential benefits and you know, for me experiential is a pretty big bucket.
- 16:11Sam Panzer: Obviously it includes like literal in-person experiences and digital experiences, but it's also really anything else the program offers to get to improve your life and to kind of do things other than like the core commercial Relationship with with the brand.
- 16:26Sam Panzer: So I think I think that's definitely the main shift is like what can we do other than points and discounts?
- 16:32Sam Panzer: So huge focus for us in the last like two years has been Partnership driven program.
- 16:38Sam Panzer: So what are like the kind of complimentary other products and services that you can introduce your, your customers to?
- 16:45Sam Panzer: That's been a thing in in telco and credit card loyalty for a long time, but I think it's really entering into new sectors, including in in retail certain certainly.
- 16:55Sam Panzer: So I think that that's been a really exciting area for us.
- 16:58Sam Panzer: You know a couple examples.
- 16:59Sam Panzer: That's a talked about Harry Rosen, where you know you've got these free alterations, point transfers On the partnership driven stuff.
- 17:06Sam Panzer: So built rewards as a customer, bars I talk about a lot where you can earn points of paying rents and they have a mastercard and the benefits are all partner driven.
- 17:14Sam Panzer: They have hundreds of different partners that you can redeem with.
- 17:17Sam Panzer: One that I really like is you can use your built rewards points to book soul cycle spin classes, which just kind of speaks to like their ideal customer and it's like, okay, it's not just a mastercard, is kind of helping you unlock this cool urban, millennial Gen Z kind of lifestyle around the brand and then like it.
- 17:35Sam Panzer: On the other side of that, we also have some really kind of Less, like flashy programs, like like site.
- 17:41Sam Panzer: One is the landscaping business, where one of the benefits helping you file your tax returns so those are like you know is filing your tax returns like an experiential thing.
- 17:50Sam Panzer: I would say, yes, it's not like the most fun experience, but the brand kind of saying in a business to business context, that's a pain of being a small business owner, so we'll get you a deal on Turbo tax or something to help you file that more, more easily and to get like the premium support from Turbo tax it at a better rate, those kinds things.
- 18:08Sam Panzer: So I think, get kind of the partnership driven stuff to be able to deliver more experiences, you know to be obviously with kind of work out the commercials or that's a really efficient reward for the business to give out to.
- 18:21Mark Johnson: Excellent.
- 18:21Mark Johnson: When you look at the brands, you should be considering experience awards.
- 18:26Mark Johnson: Are experiential rewards, good for every brand.
- 18:29Mark Johnson: It is.
- 18:29Mark Johnson: So how to determine which Experience award from other costs, from an offering, from a timing, from a tier base, is appropriate.
- 18:38Sam Panzer: Yeah, I mean, it's obviously like the most exciting thing when you can find out a partnership with the third party that wants access to your customers and where your customers will want like a deal with that brand and you can kind of like I know we're kind of partnerships it's like commercially neutral or even positive for, or the the Lance program operator.
- 18:56Sam Panzer: So I think that's that's kind of the first thing is to like look for, look for win-wins.
- 19:00Sam Panzer: I don't know it's like I'm always kind of surprised by this when I feel like there's it's worth exploring in so many different spaces because there's, you know, partnership driven awards from like utility companies and stuff where there's not necessarily like an emotional Connection between the utility and the partner benefit that they're offering through their, their program, but just because it's meaningful to the member, it's still worth doing because it increases their likelihood that they're gonna stick with you instead of Switching to a competitor.
- 19:27Sam Panzer: So I'd say like the playbook varies a lot from from business to business and and you know it's very likely that you look into this and realize that there's just not not a way to make this work commercially.
- 19:39Sam Panzer: But I would say that there's like it's at least worth exploring for just about any business.
- 19:45Sam Panzer: I can't really think of like an industry where it's not Something that's worth at least looking into.
- 19:50Sam Panzer: Obviously it's technically really difficult to like manage the, the validation with the third party Technically, so that's a big focus for their customers.
- 19:57Sam Panzer: How can we manage like the sequence of API calls to handle that?
- 20:01Sam Panzer: So it's difficult, but I do think it's it's.
- 20:04Sam Panzer: It's really worth kind of yeah, worth kind of exploring.
- 20:07Sam Panzer: There's lots of proficiency there.
- 20:10Mark Johnson: Excellent when you look at some of the challenges you see with regard to customer loyalty offerings.
- 20:14Mark Johnson: You know strategy, technology and what are you think are some of the biggest challenges that you see that brands are coming to talent one with.
- 20:25Sam Panzer: Yeah, I mean for us like a really common one is is that okay?
- 20:29Sam Panzer: We have like a static.
- 20:30Sam Panzer: I guess like most of the customers that we work have come to us with a static loyalty program.
- 20:35Sam Panzer: That's like earn and burn points and tiers, but it's just not like iterative, like it doesn't kind of evolve from there.
- 20:42Sam Panzer: It's just like kind of this like perpetual liability that we have with our customers.
- 20:45Sam Panzer: So I think we we do really well, or the challenge that we most frequently help with, is moving towards more of like a iterative approach and in loyalty, especially on on being in real time, it's one of like my biggest pet peeves as a customer when I sign up for a program, I make a purchase and then like I don't really see anything different until my profile updates like three days later or Only when, like the the return window passes for the item do I like see that.
- 21:13Sam Panzer: So I think for us like a big focus is how do we, how do we make sure that we're everything about the program is being evaluated in real time before, during and after purchase, so that even in like the order confirmation email, you can start to communicate hey, here's like the progress that you're making towards the next reward by also under the next year.
- 21:31Sam Panzer: It's really powerful psychological stuff.
- 21:33Sam Panzer: You can show you that they're working towards something that they only have this far to go or this much to after the basket to next To hit the next year.
- 21:39Sam Panzer: There's so much of this like moment marketing that I think program operators leave on the table just because there's an overnight sync with their loyalty program Legacy technology before you can show anything in the program.
- 21:53Sam Panzer: So I think that's like for us is the most important thing, is like being kind of involved throughout the customer experience in real time, again like through it.
- 22:00Sam Panzer: If it's an e-commerce play, it's showing value like you know through it, the, the, the shopping experiences on the checkout page, in the order confirmation emails.
- 22:09Sam Panzer: So they really kind of know what they're working towards and what they need to do next to get you know an attractive reward excellent.
- 22:18Mark Johnson: When you look at real-time interactions, that's something that we're seeing a city for amount of interest, retail restaurant, qsr Fuel.
- 22:28Mark Johnson: You know, with the move to more real-time interactions, you know, is that a challenge for some brands to meet, not only from a technology perspective but from the right content, from the right offering kind of being in the moment.
- 22:41Mark Johnson: You know, how do brands do that effectively?
- 22:45Mark Johnson: How should they be looking at that?
- 22:47Sam Panzer: Yeah, I mean it's, it's.
- 22:48Sam Panzer: It's definitely one of those things where you need to do a pretty comprehensive I don't know you could call it an audit of just like where are the lags and overnight sinks and weekly manual BI jobs that are like stitching everything together.
- 23:03Sam Panzer: I think that, like for kind of the more commercial managers or the marketing managers of a program, they might just kind of not understand, like where the it's just always worth reinvestigating, exactly where those delays are.
- 23:17Sam Panzer: You know, I'd say that like for us, like in terms of like being the actual loyalty program, tech, like the evaluation of different benefits and incentives, you know, we know, like we're good on that, but there might be something in like the CRM, the CDP, or like the point of sale system where that's like a delayed or your store is, I don't know, offline 20% of the time, because the internet and the shopping mall that you're in sucks like all those kinds of things.
- 23:42Sam Panzer: Just to understand, okay, like where's the, where's the connectivity, breaking down in the stack and making sure that you know, yeah, exactly kind of where.
- 23:51Sam Panzer: Yeah, where real time is not, yeah, where the blockers to real time are Okay excellent.
- 23:59Mark Johnson: Well, Sam, this has been very interesting getting your perspective on some of the challenges and opportunities for 2024 for brands in customer loyalty.
- 24:07Mark Johnson: Since you're on the front lines, it's great to get your perspective.
- 24:10Mark Johnson: So thank you very much for taking the time to share today.
- 24:13Sam Panzer: Thanks a lot, mark, great to chat with you today.
- 24:16Mark Johnson: Absolutely, and thank you for listening.
- 24:18Mark Johnson: Make sure you join us back for another edition of loyalty live and until then, have a wonderful day.