Editor’s Note: Easyrewardz has committed a decade to learning, excelling, and transforming the Customer Experience (CX). Easyrewardz was a sponsor of the Loyalty Academy’s 2022 Inaugural Certified Loyalty Marketing Professional™ workshop in Mumbai. Its sponsorship is testimony to their commitment to the industry and the people who make it happen! To learn more about 2022 Customer Loyalty trends in the Indian Loyalty Market and how Easyrewardz is responding to these changes, please contact Anjum Rastogi.
By: Anjum Rastogi, Loyalty & CRM Evangelist | CMO - Easyrewardz
In Part One, we examined the changing environment for loyalty in India and offered observations about current trends. In this article we’ll look at the opportunities and challenges that are re-defining India’s loyalty ecosystem.
Seizing Loyalty Opportunities
Easyrewardz believes in the motto ‘When everything is connected, how you connect is everything.’ This philosophy drives its mission to help clients create connected customer experiences. As the loyalty landscape undergoes a metamorphosis in India, brands can dip into a variety of new opportunities to build engagement and broaden their customers’ experiences with loyalty programs. What are these opportunities that marketers are tapping into?
Connect with the Millennials
Millennials have turned the loyalty ecosystem on its head. They are tech-savvy, seek instant gratification, and look for brands and programs that promote sustainability and social impact. This makes their brand loyalty decisions more complex. Also, as millennials are most comfortable in co-existing in both the online and offline world, marketers need to ensure that their loyalty programs cut across channels and are consistent and credible.
Easyrewardz believes that loyalty wields a soft power to the customer that brings them in as a stakeholder in the brand. By listening to the Voice of Customer and understanding their likes and dislikes brands can strengthen connections. Another important component is to educate enterprises about how they can cut silos in data and deliver a unified experience where each LOB or SBO can participate in customer retention by relaying the right information to the right department.
Switch on the power of data
New-age loyalty strategies can only achieve objectives when they are fuelled by data and technology. Consumers want to connect with companies in new ways, and they’re increasingly looking at transactional engagement opportunities. Data is providing loyalty programs with a more holistic view of the customer and gaining an in-depth view of user journeys.
Improving human connections using the power of AI and ML
To create personalised loyalty programs, brands need to build stronger connections with their customers. This can be best done by delving into customer data to gain insights into their users. AI and machine learning are emerging as the go-to ways of analysing customer behaviour and building interactive and engaging loyalty programs. An algorithm-powered model helps brands build insightful and personalised loyalty experiences.
Lessons learned from the pandemic
An important lesson that the pandemic taught brands was to take the pure transactional element out of their customer engagement strategies. For instance, instead of `buy-and-win’ messaging, many brands focused on staying safe and keeping healthy. They learned that contextual messaging goes a long way in building customer trust and loyalty.
Roadblocks ahead: Challenges
The road to building successful loyalty programs has many twists and turns. Customer expectations are changing fast. Technology is evolving at breakneck speed. What’s more, it’s a saturated loyalty market, which makes it difficult for brands to stand out from the crowd. What are the other speed breakers that loyalty marketers must contend with?
Spreading loyalty education among consumers
Even though there are “n”-number of loyalty cards and programs in the market, individuals and businesses are still not completely informed about the real concept of loyalty, and the benefits and value they bring. Educating your customer is vital to increase awareness about the significance of being part of a loyalty initiative.
Easyrewardz has helped many brands understand that loyalty is not a cost centre but a profit centre. We help brands understand program economics through measures like lift-shift and customer retention. Easyrewardz has also been pioneers in educating brands that loyalty can help them differentiate and enhance their offerings. Tactics including accrual which is a mix of points, instant gratification and education to communication strategies which focus on sending the right message to the right customer at the right time. Such tactics can be leveraged to create a “wow” moment in customers redemption journey by implementing experiential reward portals which also carry communication about benefits.
Creating a well-oiled redemption system
Brands need a well-oiled redemption system to ensure their loyalty initiative is a success. The system comprises a network of redemption partners and a back-end operations team that is always at hand to handle redemption requests quickly and smoothly. Ensuring that both these functions work smoothly and in tandem can be a big challenge for brands.
Creating a well-structured, omnichannel loyalty program
It’s easy to roll out a loyalty initiative. The difficult part is to get customers to use it. To make a loyalty program a success, brands need to structure the program in a way that it can be accessed from anywhere, through any channel.
Keep the tech aspect strong
Technology has become the foundation of modern-day loyalty programs. And that’s why AI-powered, all-encompassing, and end-to-end loyalty toolkits are gaining increased traction in the Indian loyalty ecosystem. Such tech-powered solutions help brands to manage the complexities of large and diverse loyalty incentives while being able to scale with ease.
Building Customer Loyalty – the Easyrewardz Way
If you’re looking at building a base of loyal customers in India, go for a solution that is in sync with the latest tech trends, and offers intelligent, personalised, and cross-channel loyalty experiences.
Leveraging experience and technology expertise garnered through several years of experience in creating loyalty programs and CRM tools, Easyrewardz is revolutionizing the way consumer brands across retail, banking, travel & hospitality, and healthcare engage with customers, in India and globally. We believe that loyalty delivers a common yardstick to measure customer profitability and are helping brands register fast-track growth and delight customers.
Our cloud-based customer lifecycle management solutions are powered by an omnichannel approach that enables brands to engage with consumers through personalized experiences. We constantly strive to create one-stop shop solutions for our brand partners and deliver seamless customer experiences with leading-edge solutions like “Zence,” our new CRM stack.
Easyrewardz product USP is that we have a business strategy roadmap (i.e., tiering mechanism, referral module, experiential program site, being channel agnostic to engage with users on their preferred channel, helping brands access single view of customer, how to analyse and create the right cohorts for the offering and more) built into our technology offerings. Every customer action is captured and understood to help deliver the best strategy for that customer.
Easyrewardz’ biggest USP is that it empowers brands to go beyond transactional loyalty. This is achieved by deploying appropriate measures to see how brands are performing with their customers – on the fronts of both monetary and non-monetary actions. This covers the traditional lift-and-shift methods to find out whether the customer is spending more or if the stickiness index has improved. The solution also helps businesses gauge how emotionally connected their customers are with their brand.
To learn more about these opportunities and how Easyrewardz is responding to changes in the Indian loyalty marketplace, contact us.
