Latest / Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360 / What We're Seeing and Hearing: August 26, 2024

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What We're Seeing and Hearing: August 26, 2024 · Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Good afternoon, hope everyone's well.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to what we're Seeing, what we're Hearing.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: This is the update for August 2024.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: This will serve as a recap for members of Loyalty360 as to some of the things that we discussed within the community for the previous week, and we'll also be addressing one-off topics as well, pertaining to customer channel and brand loyalty.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: These should be also relevant and impactful, hopefully, to those who are interested in customer channel and brand loyalty, as the topics and trends that we will be discussing within what we're hearing, what we're seeing are those that we are hearing within our peer community.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: One of the challenges we continue to hear a great deal about and kind of is growing in importance and impact is this idea of training and socialization around the customer loyalty programs.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Last month in July, per Jensen, who's the loyalty lead at Stop and Shop, led a lunch and learn discussion, which is our 12 or 12.30, sometimes 1 pm discussions, where we get the brand members of Loyalty360 together and a brand leads a topic relevant to customer channel and brand loyalty.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: He talked about his experience running the customer loyalty program at Stop and Shop and as he came into the program and into the organization, he realized that there was a need for selling in the customer loyalty program.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: You should have all have access to this meeting.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: If not, let us know and we can get you that access.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: But there were a couple of points that were very impactful from his discussion.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: One of the things that he did is he kind of managed by walking around, as we've heard about.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: He wanted to understand the existing perspectives within the organization as to what people knew about the program, those who were the stakeholders, and as he did so, he had one-off meetings, sometimes more than once, with the same person to understand their understanding of the program.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: He tried to effectively listen to the respective challenges and also kind of understand how much they knew about the program.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: That allowed him to be able to respond to them in a manner that could build alignment.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: He also realized that there is a need to continually focus on training on the educational aspects of a customer loyalty program.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: This is something that we've heard from brands as well that they've kind of gotten away from.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: This past week we also had a couple of peer group meetings.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Our peer groups are for senior level brand members of Loyalty360, where we bring together individuals from a diverse set of five industry usually director, senior director and above for a candid discussion on the topics pertaining to customer loyalty.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: It's a very unique peer forum.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: The topic of customer training, customer loyalty, training and socialization was indeed one of the topics we had.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: It was a very interesting discussion.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: There were four or five trends that we saw in that meeting.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: There was discussion around refreshing a brand.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: As a brand refreshes their brand, their brand offering or even their store offerings.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: Discussion around one brand who, every 10 years, redoes their store fronts.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: They redo the layout, they put some clean paint on the program, maybe bring in additional areas in the store that are relevant to the customer's needs.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Those opportunities are a great opportunity to talk to and listen to your constituents, but also it's a great opportunity to do training in a very casual environment.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: As they relaunch the program, as they get all the employees together to talk about the impacts of the brand refresh.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: It's a great opportunity to talk about the need for more training or a more detailed approach to customer loyalty.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: The second topic is understanding what your employees know about the program and finding the outliers, these so-called digital ambassadors.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: We heard that invariably when a brand has a periodic push, where there's some incentive to get people to sign up for the program.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: There can be challenges with fraud, stuffing of the ballot, quote-unquote, where they might be sitting with their friends and family just to be able to achieve that bonus that may have been offered or that incentive that may have been offered.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: In that process, they realize that, even though there are a number of people who don't enjoy doing that, there are invariably one or two advocates that are really passionate about the program and its impact and brands are starting to realize that they need to create positions around these individuals to identify them and create positions for them where they can be the advocates so they can train others within the organization in a formal and informal manner, and they also periodically man stations within the store as people sign up to make sure that they understand the program.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: So if they have questions they are at the kiosk or at locations of the store or even potentially in hotel organizations where they can address that.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: They can be that front line training but also that ambassador that really helps advocate for the program we also heard.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: Point three was that there's a greater reliance on statistics and metrics and being able to share the effective ones, the right ones, with your employees.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: What is the loyalty, participation or activation rate, how many people are actually identifying themselves online or in-store?
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: And how do you align the sales incentives for the organization, the quarterling, but also how do you convey the importance of making sure that people are identifying themselves or, if they're not, to get them involved in the program?
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: Another interesting topic we heard is this idea around bit size training, much like this.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: Uh, they're doing it both internally and externally.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Some brands are using tick tock or youtube for five to ten minute training sessions where they can kind of address different topics right, could be the frontline employees, why customer loyalty is important to them, or even to the customers, right?
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: How do you use the program?
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: How do you engage the program?
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: This was a pretty significant discussion during the 2024 Loyalty Expo with our advisory board.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: We see a number of different brands actually a number of the award winners who are doing unique things around training, this short burst type training.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: And the last topic we heard in the peer group was this idea that when is training too much, being able to effectively step back and understand what is working and what may not be working, when you may have some burnout or when the message may not be coming through, is a big challenge.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: So being able to effectively understand kind of where the program is is very important.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: We also see this in the surveys we've done over the last couple of years.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: When you look at the brand surveys that we put out, we usually ask a question around is there a need for more education or training around the program?
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: For example, in our emotional loyalty report in the fall of 2023, 66% of brands responded that an employee's understanding and training regarding emotional loyalty is very important and 94% said it's either very important or somewhat important.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: So, again, there is a need for more sustained training methodologies around customer loyalty, especially as data and privacy and disparate technologies that brands are using to engage the customers around.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: We also saw that in our next generation customer loyalty report early in 2024, we asked do you feel that there is a need to create a better understanding of the customer loyalty efforts for your customers externally or your employees internally?
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: 76% of the respondents responded yes to internal and external.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: So again, a pretty significant need for best practices around training.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Training was something that brands had moved away from going in and out of COVID and the challenge of understanding the program is something that brands may be struggling with, depending on the brand.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: We would love to know what is working for you and your customer loyalty program.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: How are you adapting your training and socialization processes around customer loyalty?
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: What's working?
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: We have a number of digital roundtables coming up over the coming weeks.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: We're going to be discussing this in more depth, so there will be kind of an additive process.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: This week we also have Amy Barnett from Cracker Barrel.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: She's going to discuss how their brand is looking at, kind of the value proposition.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: What does the brand mean to the customers and how can they potentially refresh or enhance the program to remain relevant to their already loyal customer loyalty program members, but also trying to understand what that next generation of customer loyalty client may look like.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: The Cracker Barrel approach to advancing brand relevancy with a modern digital loyalty ecosphere.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: That, uh, that's gonna be august 27th at 12 noon.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Looking forward to seeing you there.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: If you have questions, please drop something in in the comments section before.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: We'd love to hear are the topics and challenges that you have.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Until then, have a great day.