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During a recent retail co-branded credit card client engagement, it became clear to me that retail co-branded credit cards are generally behind their bank credit card counterparts when it comes to the utilization of digital channels for the purposes of securing new cardholders. It is time for retail co-branded credit cards to take notice and actively explore and utilize digital channels to extend their reach to where their potential cardholders reside. It is increasingly important to communicate and reach out to consumer cohorts differentially, as seen in Bond’s Loyalty Report 2019.

Over the last 3 years, loyalty programs have become an attractive target of digital fraudsters. In fact, it was reported that 48 percent of businesses were hit by account takeovers (ATO), which cost companies more than $2.3 billion worldwide. Delta, Air Miles, Marriott, and PC Optimum loyalty programs were all hit by fraud with thieves reportedly hacking into accounts, stealing points, and going on shopping sprees. As fraudsters become more sophisticated in their techniques, companies need to be more sophisticated in their approach to fraud prevention and detection.

 As featured in Loyalty 360

Keep up with an innovative mobile loyalty strategy

Loyalty—it’s in your customers’ pockets and at their fingertips. Smart brands are acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers with a loyalty strategy that harnesses the simplicity and readily-adopted nature of mobile. Here are some ideas on how leverage new integrations in mobile technology to personalize and enrich your customers’ journey.

If there is one thing all businesses have in common, it’s the need to attract, engage, and keep customers coming back. Loyalty programs were born out of a need to do this when shop owners gave customers copper tokens that could be redeemed for products on future purchases. Rewards have evolved a lot since then and our more traditional view of rewards, including merchandise for consumer programs, emerged in the ’80s through printed catalogs (remember those?).

Fast-forward to today, when the breadth of loyalty rewards programs across numerous sectors includes vast online catalogs of merchandise, gift card rewards, cause-related redemptions, travel, payment with points, point transfers, and experiential rewards—all aimed at engendering customer loyalty. While the pursuit of rewards breadth can be enticing for loyalty marketers, breadth is not enough to drive customer engagement.

It’s been close to a decade since blockchain technology surfaced, offering the tech community new possibilities and multiple uses. In our innovation lab, we’ve been exploring blockchain technology over the last few years; testing use cases with partners and clients, and continuing to examine whether the technology is helpful for customer engagement and loyalty purposes, or if it’s just hype?

Building a successful CX strategy can feel like a haunting task. Brands recognize the importance of defining and delivering a differentiated Customer Experience, but often don’t know where to start, or get lost along the journey. The right Customer Experience potion is the combination of a few key ingredients, including a CX strategy aligned with the brand promise, defining the business outcomes your CX work will impact, mapping the entire journey (with the customer), and engaging your employees by creating a CX culture.

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.