How Businesses Can Overcome Customer Challenges With Loyalty Data

No matter what industry you are in, there are always going to be challenges that your brand needs to overcome. It’s important to be proactive when trying to overcome these customer challenges and you may be surprised at how useful loyalty data can be. By putting the collected data to use, businesses are able to better understand their customers and anticipate their needs and challenges before it gets out of hand. This will foster a stronger and more profitable customer relationship and lead to long term loyalty.

Take a look at some of these challenges and solutions solved by loyalty data and see how they can benefit your brand.

Challenge: A brand wants to provide more personalized interactions with their customers

Solution: Utilize data segmentation and personalization tools

Data segmentation and personalization is key to identifying similar customers by behaviors and attributes, and being able to market to their specific preferences and interests. If you are able to gather their data and determine their habits, preferences and even purchase history you will better know how, when, and what to market towards them to get the best results. Using this type of customer data to create more personalized communications and offers to your different customers segments will result in an increase in customer engagement and satisfaction.

Be sure to monitor your data and results carefully though, as the wrong types of engagement can cause customers to disengage. For example, if a customer continues to receive emails or notifications about incentives or rewards that have nothing to do with their interests then they are likely to move to a different brand. If you aren’t putting in the work to better understand your members then your loyalty program will not become a part of their everyday life. 

Challenge: A brand is noticing a high customer churn rate  

Solution: Look into new retention strategies 

It’s important to try and catch customer churn either before it really begins or right at the beginning. It’s much more expensive and time consuming to acquire and attract new customers than retaining your existing customer base. It’s crucial that your team actively monitors the customer loyalty data to notice when a customer becomes “at risk” and immediately begins to work on retention strategies. Some of those strategies to reduce customer churn include:

• Sending customers relevant and valuable communications 
• Providing targeted incentives
• Unique offers or discounts
• Limited-time or exclusive access to special products or services

Challenge: A brand wants to know which rewards and incentives are performing well and which are not

Solution: Utilize analytics to optimize rewards offerings

When your loyalty program offers a wide range of rewards and incentives, it’s important you are always monitoring which ones are causing high engagement and which ones are rarely ever used. This will allow you to know what categories of rewards certain customer segments are enjoying and that can give you ideas on other rewards you should look into adding to the catalog. This data will also let you see which rewards you could get rid of due to the lack of customer engagement.

Keeping your rewards catalog up to date with your customers preferences will drive desired behaviors and make them excited about what your program offers. You don’t want to be the loyalty program that has outdated and boring rewards. Stay up to date on what your customers are excited about and you will quickly learn the most effective rewards to getting your customers engaged. 

Challenge: You notice a rise in customers “ghosting” at different parts of the customer journey

Solution: Create a customer journey map

Has your brand noticed that once customers hit a certain point in their customer journey they either unsubscribe or “ghost” your program? There could be a number of reasons that this is happening but it’s important to quickly determine what is causing your customers to leave so that you can fix the issue and prevent this from happening in the future. If you are able to create a map of your customer’s journeys then you can see which touch points could use some improvement.

You want to be sure that your customers have an overall positive and easy experience from the time they begin using your program. If you continue to see customer’s dropping off but don’t do anything about it then you will run into bigger problems in the future and will likely see customers moving to competitors programs. 

Challenge: You're planning a new campaign and want to identify specific customer behaviors to target

Solution: implement predictive analytics

It is exciting to launch a new product or campaign and you want to be sure that you are able to market it correctly to your different customer segments. By adding predictive analytics to your program you can use the data that you have previously gathered from your customers and get a glimpse into what your customer’s behavior might be based on their trends.

This is extremely beneficial because you can see which customers are more likely to churn and take action early to work on retaining them. Like we mentioned before with implementing retention strategies, when you are actively monitoring your customer’s data then you can catch these “at-risk” customers early and bring back their engagement with your program. 

Challenge: You notice customers are commenting on issues with UX or features within your loyalty program

Solution: Invest in upgrading your loyalty platform technology

Having up-to-date loyalty platform technology is key for not only collecting data but also to have a successful loyalty program. This doesn’t mean that your program should change every other week to keep up with every new trend, but customers notice when a program is starting to become out of date and that’s not what you want to hear.

Investing in your technology not only benefits the customer but it also benefits your brand on the backend. When you invest in new customer relationship management (CRM) systems, analytics tools, and data platforms then you are able to better collect and analyze your customer data. Up-to-date technology is essential because it directly correlates between your customers and their experiences with your program as a whole. 

Loyalty Data Is Meant To Be Used, Not Ignored

Data is a very useful and powerful tool-when you use it correctly. If you are able to interpret the data you are collecting and see what changes need to be made in order to benefit your business and customers then you will see success. These are just a few examples of some customer challenges you might come across but the solutions should be implemented regardless. It’s important to be proactive to get ahead of these issues and allow your customers to have a seamless experience with your program.