Make it easy
By Ashok MS Chief Operating Officer, Accentiv I have always wondered whether the apparel brand that I have been loyal to for more than 10 years knows about my loyalty. I have always wondered how would they figure out the reasons for me buying apparel from them – at times my bill would be more than Rs 20,000 buying Diwali gifts for the entire family; at other times I would just buy a box of handkerchiefs for Rs 200 as I had forgotten to carry my hanky. These reflections helped design inputs for apparel brands for which we started conceptualizing and executing loyalty programmes – by suggesting to them the reasons why customers buy in their enrolment forms. We then extrapolated the bill amounts of individual customers and deciphered the occasion for which they were buying from the brand. Similarly, we encouraged the brands to reach out to select high value customers and have a conversation with them over coffee, and understand in depth their buying behaviour. Obviously, the data of the customers’ purchases and the hypothesis of their habits were available with the brand manager to probe and understand during the conversation. We also helped the brands design and execute a marketing plan to communicate with customers, including sending “Miss you” mailers to those who had not shown up for more than six months and sending occasion based mailers to others. Similarly, a few years back, I had to physically go to an airline’s South Mumbai office, some 20 km from my place of work, and submit an application to redeem frequent flyer miles. I wanted to use the redeemed air-miles to pay for my ticket to a holiday in a foreign destination, but was told that the miles would be credited to my account only after two weeks. This was not a very pleasant situation as the prices of tickets continued to rise every day. While things have certainly improved for the better since then, this episode made me wonder why there could not be a more user-friendly and instant process of redemption. Hence, we have been pushing our vendors whose vouchers we were carrying in our catalogues to move to our digital platform so that we could issue electronic vouchers, to enable customers to get their vouchers within minutes of placing their request for redemption of loyalty points. Of course, this was not easy as most brands that issue these vouchers are not integrated at their back end operations and hence digital vouchers could be prone to fraud. However, an evangelical selling approach by us to push them to go digital has started yielding results with many brands now considering digital vouchers. Again, when we were implementing a channel loyalty programme for an FMCG company for their retailers a couple of years back, we had no option but to manually enter the bills of their purchases for issuance of points. This was because wholesalers’ invoicing processes were not automated and even those who used computers had different software, making it difficult to normalize data. When we were asked to suggest a solution by another FMCG company for a retailer loyalty programme, we came up with a PDA solution for capture of data at the retailer end which was authenticated by the retailer with a password. The distributor staff who visited the retailers carried these PDAs and were able to capture data instantly and accurately. The whole process of points accrual and redemption could become much easier. Feedback: ashok.ms@edenred.com
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