Successful Workplace

As customers we all know the difference between a financial transaction and a shopping experience. Even though retailers understand this, the vast majority of today’s customer loyalty programs involve earning points through purchases in what can best be called transactional rewards. From a member perspective, they are undifferentiated and become just a kaleidoscope of plastic cards which […]

There are two things we can expect every morning when we wake up. The first is that the sun has returned from the other side of the world and the second is a queue of loyalty program emails waiting in our inboxes, screaming of discounts and one-day sales. According to The Colloquy 2011 Loyalty Census, the […]

Indoor mapping of consumer location is the latest arrow in the quiver of the retail marketer. When marketers know where things are happening, they can develop interesting patterns for where to put resources like people, signage and information technology. Geolocation also provides the remarkable ability to spot the patterns that predict what to expect from […]

Travel and other loyalty programs are going through challenging times. Programs that floated along for decades, blissfully counting up points based on spend, transactions, nights or miles are suddenly finding themselves in an increasingly mobile, connected world that allows for something more. The problem isn’t that traditional loyalty programs haven’t answered the call. The real […]

Everyone wants to categorize and define the increasingly fast evolution of how businesses sell and their customers buy. Getting ahead of the trend is everyone’s goal, but we know intuitively that some will prosper and others will be in their shadow. The prosperous will turn their customers into fans. So many acronyms A recent post talked about […]

What if the biggest fans of your brand are able to step outside the shopping experience simply because they follow their passions? That’s exactly what The North Face offers to its customers when they give PeakPoints for every dollar spent—for sharing on social media like Facebook and participating in local sporting events like the San […]

The following is a guest post by David Rosen. This is the beginning of our blog series on loyalty for SMBs. We spend a tremendous amount of time with owners of small to medium sized businesses – restaurants, pharmacies, retailers – discussing how to build loyalty. One of their most basic challenges, hard as it […]

As technology expands rapidly to manage customer experience, a subtle shift is under way in who gathers and uses loyalty and other data to manage the customer relationship. No one needs to remind us how quickly the nature of shopping and customer experience is changing. We see signs of it everywhere and need look no […]

An article in today’s TechCrunch summed it up nicely: Twitter Study Shows Its Mobile-First Users Are Younger, More Engaged And Easier to Market To. If you don’t see what that means, repeat it to yourself again. There’s money in mobile-first The world is ultimately driven by economic models and Twitter is telling us that social interaction […]

Customer experience management is a very hot topic because so much is in flux at the same moment. Before recent times, we managed customers as demographic segments and used focus groups and segmented lists to design and deliver the best message at the best time based on a great deal of pre-planning. And we were […]

Just today PayPal announced that they added more retailers to their in-store payments application and are now at 18,000 retail outlets in the US. Amazing how technology that everyone expected would help break us free from brick and mortar is now squarely (pun intended) on making mobile payments to local stores much easier. If you’re […]

So we’ve survived the Mayan Apocalypse and a passion-filled election here in the U.S. only to face the “Fiscal Cliff”…will our troubles never end? New years are a chance for new starts so it would be great to start the year looking forward to something other than disaster. For us, there are many reasons to […]

According to a recent report commissioned by Oracle, 81% of European consumers would happily hand over more of their hard-earned for a better customer experience and that consumers will eventually turn away from brands who just don’t service them the way they’re expected to. But seriously, does paying more for the customer experience actually guarantee […]

The following was a post written for Loyalty Lab and their event-driven approach to loyalty.  With Black Friday behind us and Christmas just weeks away, retail establishments across the world are in their busiest time of the year. Are you maximizing the surge in holiday business? With that in mind, here’s our carol for you: […]

The Internet is coming up on 20 years soon and there will be an enormous amount of analysis on how it changed the world. There’s no doubt that it connected, globalized, outsourced, and mobilized our lives. But what it never did…thought some expected it to, was give us money for nothing. Dire Straits cynical look […]

In the age of the digitally connected customer, we’ve never had more opportunity to connected personally with customers and create ‘fans’. But where to make the big bets and how to learn to do this without breaking the current model? It takes a test market… As Brian Solis put it recently, there’s a new generation […]