Video Interview featuring loyalty experts: Benjamin Lipsey, Head of Flying Blue Air France - KLM // Andrea Pinna, Global SVP Loyalty Strategy, Radisson Hotel Group // Iain Pringle, Partner, New World Loyalty, UK // Kisbye, CEO, Loyal Solutions, Denmark // Chuck Ehredt, CEO Currency Alliance, Spain // Ani Elmaoglu, CEO, Ketchup, Turkey
GLO
Ben Lipsey, Head of Flying Blue, Air France – KLM: 2023, we’re focusing on laying the groundwork for new features that we want to launch through 23/24. Data is going to be a big focus of ours, creating a consumer 360 model. To give you an example, we’re focusing on trying to push co-branded relationships or co-branded credit cards which in Europe are not as pronounced as in the US. We look at how we can offer exclusive features for corporate credit card holders. We are also looking to start partnerships with relevant stores where we can co-operate on data sharing and data collection that allows us to better market and be relevant to our shared customers. Can we better tap into the emotional levers of customers through things like gamification? All of these are on a roadmap for us, just a matter of prioritisation. In 2023/24, it’s a matter of building the foundation and the groundwork that will allow us to better develop that and scale up much more quickly as we continue.
Andrea Pinna, Global VP Loyalty Strategy, Radisson Hotels: The launch of radissonhotels.com and Radisson Rewards Points are representing both important milestones in our global five-year plan. Both have been developed with a cutting-edge customer-centric approach which allows visitors to search, select and book the deal in just a few clicks as well as explore the local surroundings. In 2023, we will be focusing on automation and personalisation at the same to optimise our resources. Radisson Hotel Group is creating today a really advanced digital experience through Radisson Plus and automation as well as the mobile experience. Hence, we are investing and also leveraging our loyalty programme in all these areas altogether.
Iain Pringle, Partner, New World Loyalty (UK): I would definitely suggest that the shift of focus and just increasing the budget is a bad idea. There have been studies I’ve read in the last year which are backed up by my experience over the years: if you’ve got a bad loyalty programme, a bad customer proposition, just doubling the amount you give away to customers is not going to work. It’s a combination of getting it right at the point of sale, getting the customer interface right and the value right. By that I mean it’s got to be an appropriate customer interface. In the past, it has been taking out your plastic card and swiping your plastic card and then collecting your points. Now there’s a move to digital. I would really advise not just doubling your points because that is not going to result in doubling your engagement. I can almost guarantee you that in almost every case. If your programme is not working, doubling your awards is not going to help.
Ani Emanoglu, Ketchup Loyalty (Turkey): Predictive analytics to support personalisation and automation of marketing. Ketchup will be focusing on machine learning technologies in 2023, which is very similar to predictive analytics and personalisation and integrate it into our loyalty engine.
Chuck Ehredt, CEO Currency Alliance (Spain): In the case of currency Alliance, we’ve already invested close to 30,000 hours in building what we consider to be the most flexible, low-cost points bank and rules engine. It has been built as microservices so they can very easily plug into the technical architecture of our clients. We do not offer a CRM or campaign management module, which are normally the most expensive and complicated modules in a loyalty programme management system. And we did not build those because our clients tend to have their own enterprise CRM and campaign management system and they don’t value that technology from us. We will continue to enhance our points bank and rules engine. During 2023 the majority of our research and development effort will go into creating more white-label solutions that our clients can deploy quickly in order to enable points exchange, which might be exchanging points between loyalty programmes or exchanging points for gift cards or carbon offsets or mobile data packs.
Peter Kisbye, CEO Loyal Solutions (Denmark): We are using the vast majority of our R&D budget on AI and machine learning in different stages. And that is part of making our software platform more proactive rather than reactive. The data is owned by our clients, and not by us, but the clients allow us to build modules that monitor and trigger events. And instead of using the old school reactive way where you have to have human intervention, we’re looking very much at how we can test both on the merchant partners, on the brand owning a programme and on the consumers. There is a need to be more predictive. We are also investing quite a bit in gamification, including NFTs because the ideal programme has components that are non-financial, and you can use NFTs to reward behaviour in a way that’s non-financial. We have a very good client, Etihad, who are very innovative and ahead of the game and they are using NF T’s. In theory, you could reward me for just entering a mall, for example, to browse around, I would get a badge, or I could visit three stores and get a badge etc. And then the third one is super boring but important. That’s of course, spending to stay ahead of the competition.
