00:00 Introduction • 01:34 About real-time personalisation • 04:41 Main challenges in implementing real-time personalisation • 05:47 Main KPIs for measuring success • 08:58 Use of AI and data analytics • 10:59 Future opportunities for growth and innovation • 12:48 Main focus for Plusgrade in 2025 • 14:03 The million points question • 14:44 Magic Wand • 15:33 Advice to younger self
GLO- 00:00 Introduction
- 01:34 About real-time personalisation
- 04:41 Main challenges in implementing real-time personalisation
- 05:47 Main KPIs for measuring success
- 08:58 Use of AI and data analytics
- 10:59 Future opportunities for growth and innovation
- 12:48 Main focus for Plusgrade in 2025
- 14:03 The million points question
- 14:44 Magic Wand
- 15:33 Advice to younger self
Transcript:
0:00
GLO: Dear Danielle, it’s an absolute pleasure to catch you here at the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam. Could you just start by introducing yourself to our members?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: First, thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here and see you again. It’s always just a great time to meet and see friends and catch up at World Aviation. I’m Danielle Brown, the Chief Marketing Officer at Plusgrade. Plusgrade works with over 200 partners in air, cruise, rail, hospitality and financial industry spaces, and we create ancillary revenue and loyalty experiences that travelers will love. Our core set of products on the Plusgrade side is in seating. So, seating upgrades, the ability to block the seat next to you or block a row through instant buying or bidding. And what we’re more known for in the loyalty space is our points business, loyalty currency retailing, or the retailing of individual loyalty points and miles to individual Loyalty Program members. All of these solutions we offer as white label, and we are headquartered in Montreal. We have about 700 people working with us in Montreal, also Toronto, London, New York, Amsterdam, Dubai, Singapore, and Tel Aviv, and this year, together, all of our products will create $7 billion in new revenue opportunities for our partners.
GLO: That is an impressive number. This year, the main topics in loyalty were loyalty currency retailing, real-time personalisation, and AI. Let’s start with real-time personalisation. What is your approach at Plusgrade? How do you help your loyalty partners to personalise in real-time?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: Personalisation has been a buzzword for so many years in loyalty. And I think people have been saying they’ve been doing it, but it’s been a little more than segmentation or contextual offers. What we do as Plusgrade is we have a proprietary decisioning engine that we’ve built ourselves that allows us to change offers for currency as people come into the storefront in real-time. So what we do in the background is we make decisions on people based on the attributes, things like, how many points or miles do they have in their account? When was the last time they redeemed? When was the last time they flew, and we might make a decision based on what offer we might want to offer them for the currency. But when they show up on our storefront, depending on how the attributes and how they validate their membership, we might change our perspective on what offers we want to give them in order to make them more relevant to that member. So when we talk about real time personalization, I think it’s important that it be real time people are living their lives and earning and burning and redeeming, and it’s important to be able to meet them with an offer that’s relevant to where they are at that point in their journey.
GLO: Offering real-time personalisation while staying relevant and without disrupting the customer journey must be a real challenge.
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: Yes, it’s really important, especially when you think about our currency retailing products, not to have a one-size-fits-all approach. So, we talk about retailing, but is this a subscription, or is it an accelerator offer, or are you topping up a purchase that someone made? Is it a promotional buy offer? And then understanding where those fit in someone’s travel life cycle helps you contextualise what product to put in front of them and what offer they’re the most likely to respond to. So, you think about it from the traveler or the loyalty program member perspective, but you also have to think about it from the loyalty program perspective. So, we may have a partner who says, I’m looking to maximise revenue, and so you can orient your offers to ensure that we’re maximising that revenue. Or you may have a program that says, I’m concerned about yield this quarter, and so we make sure that we are very sensitive to the types of offers we’re putting in the market. If you are doing personalisation in real-time, you can tune your models and your offers to make sure that you hit those specific program economics; it can’t be one size fits all.
4:41
GLO: And when you’re talking to especially new partners, what are the main challenges they face when they want to start implementing real- time, personalised offers?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: It’s interesting how the challenges, I think, haven’t really changed. When we talk to airlines, in particular, we’re really dealing with very old, fragmented technology. Over the last few days at this festival, we have heard how many people still face challenges implementing new technologies. The industry has been talking about NDC for many years, and it still feels like we haven’t gotten that much farther. It’s this siloed data, it’s difficulty with systems, and that’s why an airline would come to an external partner, in our case, for currency retailing or other ancillaries, because in a lot of instances, it’s much easier to do that with an external vendor and then figure out how you plug into the systems, rather than build that yourself.
5:47
GLO: You already mentioned earlier that there is no one-size-fits-all in terms of the KPIs, but when you measure the success of how you help your loyalty partners, which are the main KPIs you look at?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: We look at it two ways, and I think this is what’s really important. If we think about retailing currency, we can think about the direct impact of retailing that currency. So, how many dollars are you going to get from the transaction? In that case, we look at revenue, yield, and conversion. But it’s really important to think about loyalty currency retailing as more than just the immediate economic impact. What we do is look at how it drives engagement. Because, if we think about it just as a financial transaction, we’re missing the point. What we find is, if we compare a loyalty program member who buys loyalty currency post that first purchase, they earn more. They fly more, they redeem more they become so much more invested in that brand and that currency. So, looking at lifetime value post one of those transactions becomes super important to show the impact of not just that initial transaction but also the transactions across the board.
7:18
GLO: Could you share a real-life example with us?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: Yes, absolutely. I’ll give you one example. So, we took one airline with about 4 million Loyalty Program members and looked at their behaviour. We took about 250,000 of those members who had made a currency purchase, and then, rather than comparing those against all of the other people who hadn’t made a purchase, we looked at people who had the exact same attributes as those who had made the purchase, so that we could do an apples-to-apples comparison. Otherwise, it’s not that fair, right? Someone who purchases currency is obviously more engaged, and one of the key stats was those who had purchased earned 31% more points in the future and redeemed twice as many points. So, when you look at that earn-and-burn life cycle, it really managed to spur on additional activity that the loyalty program was looking for outside of that initial transaction.
8:37
GLO: That is a significant increase in customer engagement, especially when many programs are struggling with customer retention.
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: Yes, absolutely. And really thinking about a cycle, you can’t just think about the one purchase, but what are the other desired behaviours that you would like to see that member exhibit in the program and in the brand at large?
8:58
GLO: Another topic which has been widely discussed on panels this year has been AI; how do you at Plusgrade approach AI?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: AI has been part of our DNA for quite a while. I remember joining the Points organisation before the Plusgrade acquisition, and I had started the data science and analytics team; I think this was in 2014, so we’ve been thinking about AI and machine learning and employing it in our products for over 10 years. Of course, over the last few years, with the explosion of large language models, that’s really changed how the general public thinks about AI and looks at AI. What I noticed very strangely in the last few days was you have certain people who are embracing and certain people who are like, “Oh, that’s a little too complicated. We don’t really need to go there”. I think AI allows us to find patterns and make much more robust models because it can find patterns in data that are harder for humans to find. It moves beyond if A then B, you get C, and you know that you can find patterns through machine learning that a typical human can’t find. So I would say we’ve only barely scratched the surface of AI and what AI can do for us, but it’s important that it becomes part of your DNA. Or I think anyone who doesn’t employ it as part of their DNA is going to find themselves looking back and saying,” Well, I really should have gotten on that train sooner”.
10:59
GLO: Where do you see future opportunities for growth and innovation?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: I think it’s really about bringing disparate systems together. If I think about what we do at Plusgrade, I talk about the loyalty side and the ancillary side, where we’re really starting to innovate a lot more and bring both of those things together, is to say, we shouldn’t be looking at loyalty as one thing and ancillaries as another business. Companies that really are thinking about loyalty as part of their ancillary strategy, or ancillaries as part of their loyalty strategy, and figuring out how to make that a seamless experience for their members and their travelers, they’re going to be the ones who win. So, having a revenue management approach that considers the loyalty life cycle as well, rather than having revenue management and loyalty a little bit at odds, will be the ones who move ahead faster.
12:13
GLO: In one of the panels, one of the airlines mentioned that loyalty programs, or airline loyalty programs, were actually the first online sellers. Although this hasn’t improved much in the past years, now the focus is more and more on it.
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: I think the expectation now of travelers is different, and we can’t have travel or airlines lagging behind what we see direct-to-consumer retail doing we have to be able to modernise and keep up with expectations.
12:48
GLO: Let’s look a bit more short-term. What do you think will be the main focus for loyalty programs for 2025, and what is going to be the focus for Plusgrade?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: You know, I think I just touched on it before. I really think it we and we heard a little bit about it in a bunch of different titles for a bunch of the different presentations over the last few days, it was really that rapprochement of loyalty and ancillaries. I think understanding the trade offs with revenue management and understanding the most profitable and engaging path for our customer, bringing all of those together has to be the number one focus over the next year, and figuring out how to do that, while many companies are doing very large technology migrations at the same time. And for that reason, that will be our focus as well. At plus grade, we’re fortunate enough to be able to see both sides loyalty and ancillaries, and be able to continue to develop our AI muscle, our machine learning muscle in order to deliver those solutions for our partners.
14:03
GLO: Danielle, thank you very much for sharing your insights. But before I let you at Global Loyalty Organization, it’s a tradition that we finish our interviews with three personal questions. The first one is, if you had 1 million points or miles and you could do anything you wanted with them, what would you do?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: This has been a long few days, so I’m definitely thinking I would use them in the classic way I would travel. I’ve never been to the Maldives. I’d really love to go to the Maldives. So, I feel like that’s my dream destination at the moment.
14:44
GLO: And the second one is, if you had a magic wand and you could invent any technology or loyalty feature that you want, what would you invent?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: I’ve been wandering around Amsterdam and just seeing how impressed I am at the eco-consciousness of this city. And I think some sort of offset is too simple, but some sort of technology improvement for the environment, I think, would be something that we have to think about traveling and we think about responsibility, maybe it could be some eco-conscious fuel that would be affordable for everybody to use.
15:33
GLO: The last question I have to is, if you had the opportunity to talk to your younger self just starting out in the industry, and you could give one piece of advice, what would you say to yourself?
Danielle Brown, Plusgrade: I think I’d say be fearless. Just say yes, be fearless, and move forward. Everything is a learning experience, so I really don’t think there’s a mistake you can make. You can learn from anything and just keep moving forward.
Source: GLO
