There has never been a better—or more urgent—time for a customer loyalty program, and we aren’t talking about punch cards or points. The world has gone digital and mobile, making customer loyalty the critical link between what a brand needs to know about the consumer and what a consumer looks for from a brand. When done well, there’s a loyalty-based conversation that allows each party to mutually benefit from being in a brand-consumer relationship.
Brands Don’t Have Time
The challenge, however, is moving quickly from where most companies are today to a place where this conversation can take place. Brands don’t have months to make a decision, nor do they have years to implement a program to get them where they need to be. Likewise, customers are changing their expectations and buying patterns very quickly as they assimilate new technologies and new ways to shop. The customers a brand has today can be gone tomorrow, lured away by more effective customer loyalty programs that were put in place faster.
What’s more, most retail brands weren’t organized around customer loyalty. In the traditional model, the stakeholders that are needed to support a large customer loyalty program are often found across many divisions of a brand, including, but not limited to, marketing, IT, sales, and finance. The senior executives that can break through organizational barriers and bring stakeholders together first want proof that a particular strategy will work.
Proving Customer Loyalty Works
The cost of doing nothing is too high to let obstacles prevent change. The only way to achieve results in the face of such challenges is to quickly adopt a functional strategy at a cost that doesn’t cause organizational stress and upheaval. An ideal program integrates very rapidly with point-of-sale and e-commerce systems, while engaging enough customers to be meaningful. It comes with a standard set of common offers and offers metrics to show what’s working.
TIBCO Loyalty Lab is well aware of the urgent need for a fast, affordable engagement platform and has designed a JumpStart program to meet this need. For a minimal investment and with a month-to-month contract, brands can select features and functions that don’t require heavy IT presence. Loyalty Lab JumpStart empowers marketers to engage customers through a loyalty platform in no time, proving the value of their strategy and showing the ROI necessary for taking customer loyalty to the next level.
