Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with Sam Panzer, Director of Industry Strategy at Talon.One, about the 2024 trends in customer loyalty and some of the opportunities he sees within his organization from the brand side.
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with Sam Panzer, Director of Industry Strategy at Talon.One, about the 2024 trends in customer loyalty and some of the opportunities he sees within his organization from the brand side.
Good afternoon, good morning. It's Mark Johnson from Loyalty 360. Hope everyone's happy, safe and well. I want to welcome you to another edition of Loyalty Live. In this series we speak with leaders in customer channel and brand loyalty about the technology trends and best practices that drive customer engagement and impact customer loyalty. Our guests provide tactical solutions at expert advice on building and maintaining customer relationships. Today we have Sam Panzer, who's the director of industry strategy, Talon. One, and we're going to be talking about the 2024 trends in customer loyalty and some of the opportunities that he is seeing within his organization, Talon. One, from the brand side. So, Sam, thank you very much for talking with us. Great to have you here today.
Sam Panzer:Thanks, Mark, excited to be here.
Mark Johnson:Perfect. So, first off, for those who may not know, we'd like to start these on a more personal level. So we would love to know a little bit more about yourself, your current role Talon. One and maybe a little bit about your background.
Sam Panzer:Yeah, sure so. Talon. One we're a loyalty and promotions engine for brands, so we really are kind of focused on the evaluation of incentives, be that through loyalty rewards and challenges, tiers and all that, or just kind of general promotions. Working with brands like Adidas, Ticketmaster, Eddie Bauer, Fanduel, Harry Rosen on their incentive strategy. So focused on bringing in customer data, session data, all these kind of different streams of data to evaluate personalized, targeted incentives in a loyalty or promotional context. I lead our value practice, though we do some strategy work with our customers and lots around kind of program modeling, ROI, anything, business value. I love to get really geeky with our customers about.
Mark Johnson:Okay great. And for those who may not be familiar, can you give us a brief overview of Talon. One, what you guys do, how you do it with brands you work with? It'd be great to know.
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I mean we work with a couple different industries. Retail and fashion is one of our biggest ones. We'll just kind of give a case on that where we focus on bringing in different data about customers, items, anything in the session etc. And then evaluating what's like the right offer to get to that customer to motivate them to do what you want them to do. So it's a lot of a lot around, kind of you know what's like the minimum amount we need to invest to change the customer's behavior.
Sam Panzer:So it's like we have a rules-based approach to building promotional incentives could be like a loyal challenge. If it's the member of this tier and their lifetime value is here and they haven't purchased it in three months, then let's give them an offer on a category that we know they like or try and nudge them to try a new category Could also be rewarding them for taking different actions, like sharing data with the brand or those kinds of things. Yeah, I mean that's kind of the short of. It is like the engine. To evaluate that and to bring in different data and to evaluate that in real time is really, really important to us. So work with a lot of really strong, you know leaders and customer loyalty and promotion, especially so Sephora, adidas, dominoes, river Islands, devinums, to name a couple, but 250 enterprise customers around the globe.
Mark Johnson:Excellent. Over the last 12 months we've seen within our community, the growing brand community, that brands are looking to change and enhance their customer loyalty efforts, either by adding functionality, changing program structures or enhancing or changing the benefits. Is this? Something that you are seeing with in your audience and, if so, what are your clients most focused on? Changing or adapting?
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I think the space just keeps getting smarter. For the last 10 years or so, the technology has been so good that basically loyalty is a ballgame that any brand can play, from your corner coffee shop to obviously the biggest brands have been doing it for decades and in that really competitive market there's been a lot of programs that have launched just because it was kind of a cool, trendy thing to do. And now what I'd say we're seeing is really like a rationalization of benefits, with brands getting a lot smarter on what is loyal behavior and being more focused on rewarding. That Sounds really basic, but I do think that sometimes, yeah, programs launch because it sounded like a good project to do. That could drive a little bit of incremental value. But I think you've seen a lot of like scattershot programs that just give like a perpetual liability to every customer that signs up. Be a bit more precise and kind of naming these are the behaviors that we define as loyal. That's sharing data, purchasing, cross category.
Sam Panzer:Like Delta's had a really kind of a bit of turbulence around there. That changed to SkyMiles this year, but I think they're kind of great example of like. For a long time, basically anybody who flew Delta with any regularity, got some pretty good value from the program and this year they announced some changes for 2025 that some of them they rolled back. But the gist is really, for us, loyal behavior booking your hotel, booking a car and flying very regularly and preferably in in premium classes, upsetting a lot of more casual travelers who who aren't doing all those things. But it's an example of how brands are getting clear about no. For us, like, loyal behavior is really doing the whole kit and caboodle if you travel through Delta and that's what we're going to reward through our program, not like the people like me who fly a couple of times a year in in, yeah, in steerage class.
Mark Johnson:Excellent I mean. What program changes, enhancements do you think brands should be most focused on in 24?
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I think they're two. So that kind of mind for us most often. The first is that how does the loyalty program support the firm's data strategy? So loyalty programs obviously are a great vehicle for both collecting and using zero and first party data. This changes that have been underway in terms of like third party cookies and stuff. So by the end of next year, Google Chrome will phase out 99% of the third party cookies. So basically, third party data is just becoming more expensive and less, less usable. So then what affirms you? Obviously they need to. They need to collect and kind of manage their own estate in terms of customer data.
Sam Panzer:Loyalty programs are just a really good vehicle to collect that, obviously, to understand, have a higher share of customers who are registered and logged in, to be able to reward customers for sharing data with the brand, filling out preference centers or surveys, those kinds of things, and then to actually put that to use by having enough data where you can market to the user on more of a one to one basis.
Sam Panzer:So I'd say that maybe like the most noteworthy change in the last three to four years it's really feels like it's accelerating to next year is what's the data strategy of the company and how is the loyalty program helping the brand get towards this idea of, like, data, completeness? I'm sure that most brands have a long term goal around, like you know, AI strategy and all that but to do that, you need good data, and I think that loyalty programs really get advancing, you know, advancing towards that. And the second one keep this brief is just the idea of being really smart about your investment into the customer Economy has been really challenging the last 18 months, though more scrutiny and more focused on being efficient with anything you're passing back to customers through accreditation spend and retention spend.
Mark Johnson:When you look at measurement, measurement is very important. The economy's got to change, a little more challenging in some areas than others. But when brands make these changes, how should they define and measure success after making these enhancements or changes to the loyalty program?
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I mean I'd say I help our customers both with like the initial ROI program models and then also like quantifying the improvement to your program.
Sam Panzer:And it's almost easier to like measure improvements to things rather than quantifying the value in the first place.
Sam Panzer:But I think you know kind of alluded to this already but this that there's there's been a shift happening of moving from from what you call like a passive earn and burn, like static program where everybody's getting the same benefits, and then more towards a more personalized, targeted direction.
Sam Panzer:As you make that improvement. That means you're going to have more, you know, like micro moments with customers, so different permutations of offers, different activations. You try there's going to be kind of more of a dense calendar of like different things that are going out to the customer. So as that vehicle becomes moves from like this kind of passive model towards a more active, you know, iterative, get marketing vehicle for the brand. You have more opportunities to measure individual activations or attempts within that. So I think a big thing that we try and work through with our customers is how do you take some of the, the modeling that you might see more in like campaign level attribution and marketing attribution of like individual offers and move that into like your loyalty context to see what are all the different things we're trying and then kind of measuring the impact of each of those experiment, experiments or activations.
Mark Johnson:Okay, brands tell us pretty consistently that they want to stand out from their competition and then differentiate their customer loyalty strategies, customer experience offerings. But there's this quote unquote, see of sameness. We've seen it for a couple of years now when it comes to customer loyalty or rewards programs and strategies. Is this something you're seeing?
Sam Panzer:Yeah, yeah, definitely, and a big probably. You know, majority of our customers are in retail and in fashion, which is like a really mature space and loyalty. I think back to when I was yeah, when I was growing up like Kohl's rolled up, rolled up the Kohl's cash thing in like 2004, which is, you know, kind of a loyalty program, cashback scheme, whatever. But I feel like there's been like 20 years of pretty steady growth in like retail loyalty especially. And I think if you look at like the NRF's top 100 list, it's like 90, 90, some 90% I think have a loyalty program and then the rest are like Amazon and Apple and kind of ones that you can get that don't have a explicit loyalty program. I think it's just it is so busy in retail especially so there's really no room to differentiate just by having a loyalty program. It's probably not really going to move behavior in a way that it might have a couple of years ago and it was just less crowded.
Mark Johnson:When you look at brands who are looking to enhance their offerings, are there, what are two things that you would recommend to them that they should consider when they're looking to? You know, increase the efficacy or impact of the programs.
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I think I mean I guess I really am a big believer in like being able to measure the effectiveness of individual things you try in the context of the program and in terms of like differentiating. I think that obviously, anything your program does that you should really kind of like accentuate. What are the values of the brand and like what's kind of the lifestyle that your brand is helping your customers achieve as much as possible. So one just to call an example of a custom relaunch this year it's Harry Rosen's luxury menswear, menswear, clothier, and they have their Club Harry program which they relaunched with us this year, and I think Club Harry does a good job of like bringing some of the brand to life in a loyalty program that still has points and tiers and kind of you know more predictable behavior from retail loyalty program, but the benefits really kind of call the life Okay, harry Rosen stuff is really high quality menswear.
Sam Panzer:So first of all there's like alterations and repairs are part of the program that you get, you know, free alterations and then for your pairs for the next year, but the top tier, what I really like is because their ideal customer is very likely to be kind of a business traveler who has premium status with their airline. The benefits in Club Harry look similar to that where you can transfer points to friends and family or you can give status to a couple of to think up to five people at their top tier. So you know, I think it brings like, brings to life like this, this, I don't know, like culture of like of high end business traveler. That's a likely kind of you know, frequent fit for the brand. So I think, like the exact benefits vary a lot, but really kind of being true to okay, what's the lifestyle around your brand and what are your customers, what's actually differentiating in your brand, and finding a way to kind of like, highlight that, underscore it with the program.
Mark Johnson:Excellent. Privacy is another area of growing concern for brand members, with regard to both things they see in the US, as well as in Europe and abroad. When you look at some of the legislated and corporate challenges that brands have, what are you seeing in regard to privacy, in regard to impacts or challenges brands maybe haven't?
Sam Panzer:Yeah, we're a German company, so a lot of our customers and most of our businesses is in the US and we're also after Vapack, but our entire research and development team is still in Berlin, Germany.
Sam Panzer:So we're baptized in data privacy because Germans take that really, really seriously and obviously, starting with GDPR and continuing with some new stuff this year, data privacy in Europe has been a lot stricter, so I think we pay a lot of attention to I would say that most of the changes in the US are coming from private entities, so from the very large online platforms, the browsers, operating systems and the use of third-party data and tracking.
Sam Panzer:So that feels like that's been a more impactful meal that's moved in the US versus government action. So I don't know. The trend line's clear that there's always some back and forth of exactly what the changes are and when they're coming, but it does kind of get back to this idea of things need to be built on consensual marketing relationship where you're transparently collecting and using customer data in a way where the customer knows what's going on, what they're sharing, why it's being shared, what it's going to be used for, and I don't know unless you. Yeah, Lloyd's Program is really kind of where that shines, because it's a chance to ask for that in kind of a really clear way and have a clear value proposition associated with sharing that.
Mark Johnson:Excellent. When you look at some of the challenges or opportunities brands have with regard to customer loyalty, what do you think the biggest mistake brands make is regarding their customer loyalty efforts?
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I think being really clear again about what loyal behavior really is for the brands and modeling out different ways your customers will react to the benefits that you give. So I think it always sounds so basic to say that, but I don't know. You should really kind of have a clear assumption of exactly how the loyal program is going to change behavior. So is that increasing your basket size, increasing frequency, improving sentiments so customers refer more people in those kinds of things, and being a lot more clear-eyed about that other than just saying that we think this will boost general customer I don't know needs to kind of have a really clear thesis of exactly how the program will drive revenue and kind of having a pretty focused list of the outcomes the program will drive.
Sam Panzer:I think sometimes loyalty programs are launched purely as a brand activation, almost because they feel like it's something missing in their arsenal for the brand. We don't have a loyalty program, so launch a program. We don't really kind of think exactly about what are the different levers. It's more true for kind of smaller brands. Obviously, enterprise can be a bit more mature on that. So I think being really really outcome driven and being as specific as you can about the outcomes you're trying to drive is probably like the most important foundational thing that brands occasionally will miss.
Mark Johnson:So, when you look at how rewards may be challenging, changing, they're also challenging as well. There's a movement towards more personalized rewards that we continue to see here, whether it's content or product offers, or both in service offerings for even B2B clients. What are you seeing with regard to brands who are focusing on enhancing the reward offers that brands have incentives from a customer value proposition?
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I think I mean there's definitely like a huge push towards more experiential benefits and you know, for me experiential is a pretty big bucket. Obviously it includes like literal in-person experiences and digital experiences, but it's also really anything else the program offers to get to improve your life and to kind of do things other than like the core commercial Relationship with with the brand. So I think I think that's definitely the main shift is like what can we do other than points and discounts? So huge focus for us in the last like two years has been Partnership driven program. So what are like the kind of complimentary other products and services that you can introduce your, your customers to? That's been a thing in in telco and credit card loyalty for a long time, but I think it's really entering into new sectors, including in in retail certain certainly. So I think that that's been a really exciting area for us.
Sam Panzer:You know a couple examples. That's a talked about Harry Rosen, where you know you've got these free alterations, point transfers On the partnership driven stuff. So built rewards as a customer, bars I talk about a lot where you can earn points of paying rents and they have a mastercard and the benefits are all partner driven. They have hundreds of different partners that you can redeem with. One that I really like is you can use your built rewards points to book soul cycle spin classes, which just kind of speaks to like their ideal customer and it's like, okay, it's not just a mastercard, is kind of helping you unlock this cool urban, millennial Gen Z kind of lifestyle around the brand and then like it.
Sam Panzer:On the other side of that, we also have some really kind of Less, like flashy programs, like like site. One is the landscaping business, where one of the benefits helping you file your tax returns so those are like you know is filing your tax returns like an experiential thing. I would say, yes, it's not like the most fun experience, but the brand kind of saying in a business to business context, that's a pain of being a small business owner, so we'll get you a deal on Turbo tax or something to help you file that more, more easily and to get like the premium support from Turbo tax it at a better rate, those kinds things. So I think, get kind of the partnership driven stuff to be able to deliver more experiences, you know to be obviously with kind of work out the commercials or that's a really efficient reward for the business to give out to.
Mark Johnson:Excellent. When you look at the brands, you should be considering experience awards. Are experiential rewards, good for every brand. It is. So how to determine which Experience award from other costs, from an offering, from a timing, from a tier base, is appropriate.
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I mean, it's obviously like the most exciting thing when you can find out a partnership with the third party that wants access to your customers and where your customers will want like a deal with that brand and you can kind of like I know we're kind of partnerships it's like commercially neutral or even positive for, or the the Lance program operator. So I think that's that's kind of the first thing is to like look for, look for win-wins. I don't know it's like I'm always kind of surprised by this when I feel like there's it's worth exploring in so many different spaces because there's, you know, partnership driven awards from like utility companies and stuff where there's not necessarily like an emotional Connection between the utility and the partner benefit that they're offering through their, their program, but just because it's meaningful to the member, it's still worth doing because it increases their likelihood that they're gonna stick with you instead of Switching to a competitor. So I'd say like the playbook varies a lot from from business to business and and you know it's very likely that you look into this and realize that there's just not not a way to make this work commercially. But I would say that there's like it's at least worth exploring for just about any business.
Sam Panzer:I can't really think of like an industry where it's not Something that's worth at least looking into. Obviously it's technically really difficult to like manage the, the validation with the third party Technically, so that's a big focus for their customers. How can we manage like the sequence of API calls to handle that? So it's difficult, but I do think it's it's. It's really worth kind of yeah, worth kind of exploring. There's lots of proficiency there.
Mark Johnson:Excellent when you look at some of the challenges you see with regard to customer loyalty offerings. You know strategy, technology and what are you think are some of the biggest challenges that you see that brands are coming to talent one with.
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I mean for us like a really common one is is that okay? We have like a static. I guess like most of the customers that we work have come to us with a static loyalty program. That's like earn and burn points and tiers, but it's just not like iterative, like it doesn't kind of evolve from there. It's just like kind of this like perpetual liability that we have with our customers.
Sam Panzer:So I think we we do really well, or the challenge that we most frequently help with, is moving towards more of like a iterative approach and in loyalty, especially on on being in real time, it's one of like my biggest pet peeves as a customer when I sign up for a program, I make a purchase and then like I don't really see anything different until my profile updates like three days later or Only when, like the the return window passes for the item do I like see that.
Sam Panzer:So I think for us like a big focus is how do we, how do we make sure that we're everything about the program is being evaluated in real time before, during and after purchase, so that even in like the order confirmation email, you can start to communicate hey, here's like the progress that you're making towards the next reward by also under the next year.
Sam Panzer:It's really powerful psychological stuff. You can show you that they're working towards something that they only have this far to go or this much to after the basket to next To hit the next year. There's so much of this like moment marketing that I think program operators leave on the table just because there's an overnight sync with their loyalty program Legacy technology before you can show anything in the program. So I think that's like for us is the most important thing, is like being kind of involved throughout the customer experience in real time, again like through it. If it's an e-commerce play, it's showing value like you know through it, the, the, the shopping experiences on the checkout page, in the order confirmation emails. So they really kind of know what they're working towards and what they need to do next to get you know an attractive reward excellent.
Mark Johnson:When you look at real-time interactions, that's something that we're seeing a city for amount of interest, retail restaurant, qsr Fuel. You know, with the move to more real-time interactions, you know, is that a challenge for some brands to meet, not only from a technology perspective but from the right content, from the right offering kind of being in the moment. You know, how do brands do that effectively? How should they be looking at that?
Sam Panzer:Yeah, I mean it's, it's.
Sam Panzer:It's definitely one of those things where you need to do a pretty comprehensive I don't know you could call it an audit of just like where are the lags and overnight sinks and weekly manual BI jobs that are like stitching everything together.
Sam Panzer:I think that, like for kind of the more commercial managers or the marketing managers of a program, they might just kind of not understand, like where the it's just always worth reinvestigating, exactly where those delays are. You know, I'd say that like for us, like in terms of like being the actual loyalty program, tech, like the evaluation of different benefits and incentives, you know, we know, like we're good on that, but there might be something in like the CRM, the CDP, or like the point of sale system where that's like a delayed or your store is, I don't know, offline 20% of the time, because the internet and the shopping mall that you're in sucks like all those kinds of things. Just to understand, okay, like where's the, where's the connectivity, breaking down in the stack and making sure that you know, yeah, exactly kind of where. Yeah, where real time is not, yeah, where the blockers to real time are Okay excellent.
Mark Johnson:Well, Sam, this has been very interesting getting your perspective on some of the challenges and opportunities for 2024 for brands in customer loyalty. Since you're on the front lines, it's great to get your perspective. So thank you very much for taking the time to share today.
Sam Panzer:Thanks a lot, mark, great to chat with you today.
Mark Johnson:Absolutely, and thank you for listening. Make sure you join us back for another edition of loyalty live and until then, have a wonderful day.