From the Editor –
It’s been a hectic couple of days but that’s what trying to cover 900 retail technology exhibitors over the course of 2.5 days looks like. I’m talking, of course, about NRF’s 2023 Big Show which wraps up today in NYC. We’ve been previewing, demo-ing, interviewing some of the most inventive and creative commerce solutions I’ve ever seen (not an overstatement) and will be bringing you the results of that effort over the next several weeks. For today though, you’ll want to check out Robert Passikoff’s piece on Loyalty, both of the other loyalty entries (spend an extra moment on the “priorities”), and be sure that all your LOLs are the real thing.
– Mike Giambattista, Editor in Chief
FEATURE: The Little Black Dress of Loyalty
“The book demonstrated how you dressed acted as a subconscious cue when it came to establishing authority in social and business relationships. It popularized the phrase “power dressing.” Because how you dressed made a non-verbal statement about who you were as regards other people’s expectations.” Read more here.
SOME ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
Despite all the effort and money poured into CX tools by companies, customer satisfaction continues to decline. In the United States, it is now at its lowest level in nearly two decades, per data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Consumer sentiment is also at its lowest in more than two decades. This negative dynamic in the customer-centric ecosystem in which we now live creates the challenge of figuring out what is going wrong and what companies can do to fix it.
CUSTOMER LOYALTY 1
Research proves customer loyalty is the lifeline companies need. Key decision makers looking to invest in or revamp their loyalty programs are also able to understand how best to achieve the best ROI, as the data reveals, through the 290 million member actions executed via the Antavo platform in 2022:
- The lifetime value of members who spend points in a loyalty program is 6.3X higher
- Members who redeem personalised offers spend 4.5X more annually
- Program members who redeem partner rewards have 3.4X higher spend
CUSTOMER LOYALTY 2
There are differing perceptions in priorities for both consumers and retailers in 2023. For consumers, rewarding customer loyalty (50%) tops the list of what they want to see from retailers in a year where purse strings are tight. This is followed by improving customer service (46%), understanding customers better (35%), connecting the online and in store experience (30%) and making the delivery process better (28%)
For retailers, the list is slightly different – with a huge focus on digital. Improving customer service (53.4%) is the top priority for retailers in 2023, followed by rewarding customer loyalty (53%), enhancing online experiences (50%), understanding customers better (49%) and providing more digital experiences (44%). When it comes to frequency of engagement, a whopping 61% of retailers surveyed believe that their customers want to hear from them multiple times a week. In reality, only 31% of consumers agree, with the majority preferring contact once a week or less.
HEADLESS SEGMENTATION
To win in the modern era, marketing teams must focus on creating a seamless experience for their customers across all available touchpoints from email marketing and onsite recommendations to social media ads and the in-store experience. The only way to effectively do this is to employ an effective headless customer segmentation strategy. By taking the steps required to remove channel bias and data silos and looking at meaningful cohorts driven by key and integral data points, you can ensure that you’re always serving your customers in the best way possible.
DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING
Machine Learning Makes Sure Your LOLS Are Genuine. LOL has been reduced to a mere punctuation mark, with no guarantee that the sender was actually laughing, chuckling, chortling, or even snickering. What have we become? To put an end to this madness, [Brian Moore] has come up with the LOL verifier. Like darn near every project we see these days, it uses a machine learning algorithm — EdgeImpulse in this case.
