Part 3 – So, How Do You Design a Customer Value Management Program?
In the first two parts of this series, we looked at ‘Understand your Objectives’ (read here), and ‘Program Characteristics’ (read here). In the final part of the series, we now take those two steps and look at what they mean for you.
Firstly, it’s important to understand that your brand is a powerful asset which should aspire to having broad appeal across your customer communities and which cannot easily be copied by your competitors. The nature of your customer base can guide which regional/national/international deals can be struck to support delivering value, but there are likely to be many options especially in a post-pandemic, online-centric world.
Understand your motivations and your customer base then your negotiating power can really bring the best deals in the market to your subscribers. Once this is achieved, depending on the audience and other factors that we have touched upon in this blog series, the selection of the mechanics you deploy becomes relatively simple… one program for all markets vs. many OpCos running their own mechanics depending on the nature of your business. Evolving Systems’ technology can manage either end of the spectrum, so the design decision is really about what appeals to the customer more than any other considerations.
Also, geography will influence you in different ways depending on your location. We see gamification as being essential in successful APAC programs, while the Middle East is much more tuned in to points and status. In the US consumers care about ‘deals & incentives’ while Europe is a mixed bag. Our research has shown that loyalty programs are less prevalent in non-Anglo-Saxon markets where is more focus on recognition vs. deals.
The observations above and throughout this series are based on eighteen years of being a leader in this business though, with that said, the industry keeps reinventing itself and as you embark on your own journey, the key is to keep the program design flexible so it can change with the times.
If you’d like to discuss any of the issues we’ve raised further, we’re happy to invest the time to engage with you directly and help you to think through your options. At Evolving Systems, we have run c-level workshops before with great success, where we help narrow the decisioning around whether a program is worth doing and if so, what strategy should you follow.