Blog

Happy CX Day! In this video, people from across our organization share fundamentals that are key to delivering and achieving CX transformation success.

Put on by the Customer Experience Professionals Association, CX Day is a global celebration of the brands and professionals that create great experiences for their customers.

The chicken and the egg, age before beauty, cart before horse—while we love to debate the natural order of things, many brands are in search of a loyalty or CRM platform before understanding how the technology resides within the overall brand and program strategy. Marketers are eager to entice customers with a rewards program; however, loyalty has completely changed. Today a program involves so much more than simply launching a points platform—it requires truly understanding the customer journey and the ways in which customers engage with your brand.

In a moment of huge frustration, it’s often down to individual staff members to deliver an experience that takes that frustration away and allows one to breathe a sigh of relief and appreciation. On a recent visit to the U.K., I got to experience this first hand.

On Wednesday, in an email to Members, Air Canada shared, “Straight to the point: we heard from many customers who were excited about our plans and would prefer to transfer their Aeroplan Miles to the new Air Canada loyalty program.”

Wednesday’s news sets up a reset in the Canadian loyalty and co-brand space—with the potential to ease market consternation about the fate of Aeroplan and the intentions of Air Canada, the news brings clarity and confidence to what would otherwise have been a period of continued uncertainty leading up to June 2020.

As I look back over the past four years to when we launched Bond and began our separation from a U.S. holding company, I’m amazed, and so proud of our team and what we’ve accomplished to become an industry leader. I’m also extremely grateful for the growing list of global brands who have chosen to work with us.

While lots of great work is being done in customer experience, many brands are finding their customer journey work has lost relevance and purpose in moving the organization forward. And in the absence of a comprehensive view of the customer journey, brands are stagnating in CX. It’s time to shift the conversation to breaking down silos, making customer engagement the priority and quantifying business impact at every key interaction. Bond’s Morana Bakula, VP, Customer Experience shares the opportunity to unlock differentiation and drive meaningful business outcomes through Bond’s Customer Engagement Mapping framework. 

Update on the Rise of Paid: Our Loyalty Report 2019 research found that interest in paid memberships continue to rise. 43% of members are willing to pay a fee for enhanced benefits.

As featured in TotalRetail.

“To fee or not to fee?” will be the question many retailers ask themselves this year, as paid loyalty programs steadily take hold. While the paid model isn’t new — Costco is a pioneer in this space and game-changer Amazon Prime launched back in 2005 — more retailers are viewing pay-to-play as a compelling option for both members and their businesses. Restoration Hardware, GameStop, Bed Bath & Beyond, and GNC have all jumped on board, and the pay-to-play movement will only grow from here.

Break silos. Demonstrate business impact. Focus on customer engagement.

 Full disclosure, this is another article on customer journey mapping. However, let us reframe the conversation to focus on breaking down silos, making customer engagement the priority and quantifying business impact at every key interaction, beyond a single transaction. With our clients, we use a different kind of framework that considers the end-to-end customer journey.

Technology is rapidly changing customer expectations and the way they engage with your Brand. 

The Loyalty Report 2018 finds that Members have moved from technology skeptics to champions as 95% of members want to engage with their Program through new and emerging technologies.

From our recent 2018 Executive Launch event, Sean Claessen shares his thoughts on how Loyalty technology has reached a tipping point.

Weclome to a guest blog by Andrew Dorn, Director of Marketing Channels at RedPoint Global, a proud partner of Bond Brand Loyalty.

Loyalty programs have become extremely popular in recent years, and for good reason. Providing rewards to repeat customers is a good way to get them to keep coming back. But that’s not the whole story. To truly engage consumers and keep them loyal to your brand, you need a comprehensive strategy that centers around understanding customer behaviors, preferences, and interaction histories. Only once you have built and implemented this customer engagement strategy you can be confident of driving greater retention and loyalty over time.