We are currently seeing a digital transition and the emergence of a new customer reality in the post-pandemic era. This has had a significant impact on loyalty, customer retention and marketing.
The ENTERTAINER business’s Chief Revenue Officer – Corporate, Ahmed Gaber, lifts the lid on the endemic fragmentation in the market and provides insights on how businesses can provide the best solutions for their customers.
Loyalty is about keeping your clients engaged. The goal of loyalty is to increase and retain your current clientele through a variety of incentives, such as special offers and exclusive access passes. Most businesses already have loyalty programs or are in the process of customizing them to suit customer needs.
The Missing Piece
Acquisition involves onboarding a new client whereas retention includes maintaining your relationship with your existing clients and ensuring that you retain them. At the ENTERTAINER business, we go one step further. We acquire, maintain and retain our clients. Keeping your clients happy once you start working with them is crucial to ensuring a long-term partnership.
Fragmentation Causes Confusion
High quality loyalty programs are few and far between. In many industries, programs are fragmented because there is no single program that encompasses multiple divisions or departments within a company. For example, in banking, the credit card division wants a loyalty program specifically for credit cards, the retail division wants a program for their liability customers and the merchant acquisition division wants a loyalty program for their SME merchants.
Whereas in telco, loyalty uniformly covers all subscribers across post-paid, prepaid and data users. Also, their rewards vary based on their importance as per each company. However, telecom has a revenue management stream called customer value management (CVM), which extends base stimulation offers independently. Similar to banking, they don’t communicate with each other, yet they all reach out to the same customer with their own line of communication. This inevitably creates unnecessary confusion.
Tapping Into Customer Behaviour
At the ENTERTAINER business, we ensure that loyalty complements quality through a personalized approach. Hence the quality of the business is a prerequisite even if you have the best loyalty and rewards program. The process is simple.
We define what the client wants, which could be a seamless experience, aspirational rewards or instant gratification for their end consumer. We then build a customized solution, using data analytics combined with the best technology available such as loyalty management systems (LMS), geolocation, customer data platforms (CDPs), customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, card-linked offers and more, to ensure the end result is something that truly works for their business to improve and drive consumer behaviour.