BY PHAEDRA HISE, Colloquy.
Is your loyalty program a four-lane superhighway, or just a dead end?
I recently had two radically different shopping experiences which highlighted how the back-and-forth flow of information can drive lift and repeat business, but a dead-end program can crash customers out.
Recently I bought flowers for my daughter’s ballet concert. I don’t always remember to take flowers for the showy stage-door presentations after the performances, so this time I decided to go all out with two dozen baby-pink rosebuds. But when I got it home, an hour before showtime, I opened the wrapper to discover that the blushing pink petals were actually hiding two dozen dead roses. The heads fell completely off the stalks as my panic mounted.
Fortunately, my florist has a loyalty program, and I figured this would save the day. I remembered a similar incident with my grocer a few years earlier. At checkout, the bagger overlooked my two pounds of cooked shrimp, and I got home (two hours before a party) to discover it wasn’t there. I called the store to explain the situation, and got put on hold.
My guess is that while I was on hold, the manager was looking me up. Here, the loyalty program was working like a superhighway – with information flowing instantly into the company, and then affecting the way workers reach out and communicate with customers on the fly. The manager would have seen that I lived five miles away, had been a member of the program for ten years, purchased lots of gourmet food every week, and had a growing family. Apparently I was parked firmly enough in their sweet spot for them to fix the problem: A clerk hopped into his car and hand-delivered my shrimp to the house just in time for guests to arrive.
I expected similar treatment from my florist, and when I explained the problem I again got put on hold. But here the stories take two different roads.
My florist’s program, alas, was more of a dead end. It consisted of a paper punch card, which was designed to keep me coming back (and it did), but no data was flowing into the store to define my value or inform their decision-making. If the store had gathered my personal information and linked it to the POS system, the manager (or even the shop assistant) would have seen that I had been a loyal customer for over six years, lived nearby, and bought flowers on average twice a month. Armed with a few guidelines for loyalty program member service, the clerk could have offered to deliver fresh flowers. Or, at the very least, credited my card instantly for the purchase and offered a free flower arrangement the next time I stopped in.
Instead, when the manager came back on the line she explained that I would have to return the dead flowers for credit. No trust that my story was true, no coupon for free flowers, and definitely no delivery offer.
The more powerful loyalty program flows in both directions – as an internal tool for gathering data and applying insights, and also a method for communicating with customers and expressing appreciation. Are your sales clerks gathering the right information, and do they have the guidance and authority to use that to make quick decisions regarding your best customers?
The moral of this tale is that the grocer won: I never shopped another, even when a larger competitor opened closer to my house. I also told the story to everyone I knew. But right now, I’m looking for another florist.
Article supplied by Phaedra Hise for Colloquy.
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