Erin Raese |
Today, loyalty is a two-way value exchange with customers.
Loyalty programmes create a commitment to this – when a customer joins one and agrees to share their data, organisations, in return, promise to be a good steward of this data by delivering personalised and relevant experiences.
It’s important for organisations to protect customer data in this way, not only to ensure compliance with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation, but also to show respect to customers. Businesses should only collect the data that they need to deliver the best possible experience and make customers’ lives easier.
This value exchange and personalisation can start even before someone becomes a customer. Once they start consuming a business’s products or services, the relationship grows, and that’s when loyalty and retention happen.
The importance of customer retention can be best understood by this statistic from management consulting firm, Bain & Company: a five per cent increase in retention can increase profitability by 75 per cent. Keeping customers and keeping them spending increases the bottom line. Then add in their advocacy and companies can reduce their customer acquisition cost significantly.
Loyalty programmes are an important strategy for businesses to engage and build strong relationships with their customers. They establish a conscious two-way value exchange, allowing organisations to learn about their customers and deliver individualised experiences. A platform like Annex Cloud, combined with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, allows organisations to consensually capture first-party loyalty data and then create experiences based on this.
When we look at today’s challenges, organisations need to focus on their customers. When times get tough, it’s harder to acquire new customers because they are typically more cost-conscious. With a loyalty strategy, a company can identify its best customer and then communicate with them in a way that will keep them coming back. For example, if a product is low in stock because of supply chain issues and you know which customers want this product, you can keep the remaining supply for those customers.
A true software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform provides organisations with the utmost flexibility in how they design their loyalty and customer experience strategy.
With seamless integration with Microsoft products, the Annex Cloud Loyalty Experience Platform does just this, enabling businesses to collect data and create unique experiences for their customers at all touchpoints.
Collecting the necessary data to understand and recognise customers at every touchpoint allows organisations to build bonds that continue to grow. The Annex Cloud platform helps firms to build programmes that will track, recognise and reward customers for their engagement, spend, loyalty and advocacy.
With over 140 developers solely focused on advancing the loyalty platform, Annex Cloud will remain a leading loyalty SaaS solution working. With one team focused on performance and scalability, a second focused on client needs, and a third focused on new innovation, Annex Cloud is able to support existing clients while also enhancing our platform with new innovations. Right now, we’re growing our engagement suite, adding more enhancements to our surveys, quizzes, contests and gamification products.
Erin Raese is the senior vice president of revenue at Annex Cloud
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.