The Loyalty Leap

I read this book, The Loyalty Leap - Turning Customer Information into Customer Intimacy, due to my business. I found this book quite inspiring. If you are working for loyalty, you may find new insight and redirect your work.

In summary, the author Bryan Pearson shared his practical experience of loyalty program to explain what loyalty program is, why loyalty program is needed and how loyalty program is run. Loyalty is not simply about collecting customer data and offering benefits. There are considerations to guide you do the right things.

Every enterprise is talking about loyalty, every CEO aims at loyalty but not everyone understands what it should look like. Loyalty is not a set of numbers or a couple of pay or gift but human behaviours as well as continuous growth of an enterprise. 

The book starts with 3Rs of loyalty (maybe the author created), which are Rewards, tangible thank-you given and tailored to consumers, Recognition, appreciation to consumers' commitment to make them feel special, and Relevance which shows how consumers are well understood. In the other words, offer the right product to the right customers at the right time.

Because of the technology, on both consumer side (social media) and company side (data capacity), it becomes more agile to offer loyalty. With great power comes great responsibility. Enterprises offering loyalty have to be transparent and offer relevance with accountability of customer data. They should make better use of the customer data in a loyalty program to get customer intimacy to create emotional loyalty, thus increased profitability eventually. This comes back to the execution of the 3Rs of loyalty. 

In addition to external factors, internal factors are important. The author suggests creating right home, right culture and right environment inside an enterprise. He considers Employee Satisfaction, as well as Customer Loyalty and Profitability, as a pillar of Service Profit Model.

A crucial factor of loyalty is communication. Enterprises could start with Communication Design Blueprint which consists of a longitude view of customer data, the ability to operate and respond in real-time, the ability to integrate new media channels and manageability of real-time messaging and engaging in social media communication. There are three types of segmentations to guide the communication: Value Segmentation, whom you target, Solution Segmentation, how to reach high-value customers with resonating messages, and Impact Segmentation, what is identified as best offer and channel.

Finally the author summarises four key actions of loyalty: 

1. Invest in reaching the members you have
2. Create new value prepositions
3. Break free from the data ghetto (where it sits in the marketing or sales or customer service department and doesn't find its way into the broader organization as a foundation for strategic decision-making.)
4. Be transparent and responsible

The author apparently knows technology. He understands data. But the book is not deeply technical. It is about human and business, which loyalty actually comes from.