In today’s commercial landscape, fostering customer loyalty requires more than discounts and rewards. Brands must also deliver personalized experiences to engage and delight customers along their journey. Xoxoday empowers brands to meet this challenge with software solutions that promote loyalty by enhancing the customer experience.
Loyalty360 spoke with Xoxoday Co-Founder Manoj Agarwal about how experiences affect customer loyalty, the importance of personalization, and creating customer-centric loyalty experiences.
In today’s commercial landscape, fostering customer loyalty requires more than discounts and rewards. Brands must also deliver personalized experiences to engage and delight customers along their journey. Xoxoday empowers brands to meet this challenge with software solutions that promote loyalty by enhancing the customer experience.
Loyalty360 spoke with Xoxoday Co-Founder Manoj Agarwal about how experiences affect customer loyalty, the importance of personalization, and creating customer-centric loyalty experiences.
Good afternoon, good morning. This is Mark Johnson from Loyalty 360. I want to welcome you to another edition of Loyalty Live. In this series, we speak with the leading agencies, technology partners and consultants in customer channel and brand loyalty about the technology trends and best practices that impact a brand's ability to drive unique experiences, enhance engagement and, most importantly, impact customer loyalty. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Manoj Agarwal, who is the co-founder of Xoxod ay. How are you, Manoj?
Manoj Agarwal:I'm good Mark, and thanks for this opportunity. I'm glad to be part of this program.
Mark Johnson:Absolutely looking forward to the discussion. First off, we like to start these on a more personal level, so I'd love to know a little bit more about you, your background and then your role at Xoxoday.
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah, so I come from a small town from India. I worked with companies like Yahoo and Flipkart, and both have been very entrepreneurial the way they have been working, and that was one of the reasons why I also started my own venture way back in 2012. Now, during my job, I used to be a programmer, I used to be a software engineer and then a little bit of a product manager, but when I started Xoxo day, as a founder, I do almost like everything, but if you're to talk about my major area of work, I take care of the entire product suite, the entire marketing and everything to do with backend operations. So that is where I do it.
Mark Johnson:Okay, we also like to have a fun fact, something you enjoy doing outside of work. You have a passion you like cricket, you like hiking, biking something that you do when you're not working.
Manoj Agarwal:So, in terms of my passion, I play a lot of sports. I play tennis, badminton, and I'm also a big practitioner of yoga. I've been doing yoga for almost like 15 years, okay, so yeah, these are areas which I like beyond work.
Mark Johnson:Okay, great. It's good to keep healthy and good to keep active. So it's great to hear that Is tennis, your best sport.
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah, I love watching tennis, but in terms of play, I think I'm better at cricket.
Mark Johnson:Okay, I have to pick that. I never tried cricket, I've seen it, but I'll have to pick that up someday. Try that someday.
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah, India is a country all about cricket, so yeah.
Mark Johnson:Okay, Excellent. And for those who may not be familiar with XoxoDay, can you give us a brief overview of your company, what you do, how you do it and the industries that you work with in?
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah so Xoxoday is a suite of SaaS products which are around anything to do with customer loyalty, rewards, incentives and payouts. So these are the areas where we play. Last year, we sold our majority stake in a Singapore based company by the name Gift, so today we are combined and sell our solutions together. There are almost like 3000 clients which we work with across various parts of the world, so majority of our clients come from US and then Middle East, parts of UAE and then India, and we also have clients from, say, indonesia, singapore and UK. In terms of our solutions, we help our clients with customer loyalty solutions, employee engagement product, if they have to manage their sales or channel commissions or if they want to use our global rewards marketplace. So these are some of the industries we operate in.
Mark Johnson:Okay, when you look at customer loyalty, we are very focused on understanding how brands, suppliers, agencies define customer loyalty. So, when you define customer loyalty, how do you define for Xoxoday and your clients, and what does it mean to your organization?
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah. So see loyalty whether it is customer loyalty or any employee, employer or employee loyalty and so on I think the fundamental around loyalty is the love for the brand. So if a brand is able to create the love with their customers, that is how they start building the loyalty of the customer. And the love for the brand is the sum total of the experience you have with the brand, right from the buying journey to the journey when you are using that product. And that is why, a lot of times, you also say that customer loyalty is directly proportional to the customer experience. So if brands can focus upon building a great customer experience, they will effectively build good customer loyalty also. And how we add value as a technology provider in customer loyalty is by giving brands some tools to look at data points, do these things at scale, because you can't do customer loyalty at scale on Excel sheets and then do it efficiently. So that is where we start adding value when it comes to customer loyalty.
Mark Johnson:Okay, so you touch a little bit being able to enable brands with different data points, allowing them to do a deeper insight and analysis. And when you look at your clients, what is working when it comes to building successful customer loyalty program and strategies? Can you give us an example or two of things that seem to be working well?
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah, sure. So one of the best things which has been working for our clients is how do we help them personalize the experience for different brands of different clients, because in the world today, increasingly the demand from both clients as well as the end customers around, how do you give them personalized experience? And that is where we have tried to build a lot of capabilities into our product that how can we give them very personalized nudges and notifications? How can we help them create loyalty campaigns which are highly targeted? For example, if a brand has a cohort of users but one cohort is around women users, then how can you target your campaigns very focused and sharp for a women kind of audience? And similarly, when it comes to the uses of loyalty points, we help the brands to personalize the catalog that. How can the catalog be highly targeted to the user as per their preferences?
Manoj Agarwal:So personalization is, I think, one of the key elements which has been working for us.
Mark Johnson:Excellent. Earlier this year, we did a State of the customer loyalty research paper, and one of the things that came out was that brands are focused on redoing their customer loyalty program, adding functionality, enhancing the program. And what are you seeing in regard to your clients, both the ones you're selling to and also your current clients? Is there an interest in doing relaunches or updates? What are your clients looking for?
Manoj Agarwal:Yes, you see, if you talk about the legacy softwares in loyalty, I mean they were very clunky, the user interface and the user experience is very complex and the user journey is very, very complex. That today we are looking at omnichannel loyalty experience, that how can the customer experience a very seamless experience across multiple channels, whether it is mobile web, the physical store or anything else? So that is one big reason why customers are changing vendors or relaunching their loyalty programs. The second reason, which I already touched upon, is personalization that increasingly, the customers are asking for personalized experience across the loyalty value chain, and then they are hence I mean the brands are hence looking for solutions which can give them highly personalized touch points, and third very interesting thing which we are coming across is gamification, that.
Manoj Agarwal:How can you add a lot of gamification to engage your customers? Because the customer cohort is across your age group, so there are people as young as 19 year old and people like, say, 50 year old. So how do you engage this diverse set of customers through some highly engaging games and user interfaces? That again has been a very high demand from the customers.
Mark Johnson:Okay, excellent, good to hear. So gamification is definitely a big area of interest. We just had a webinar yesterday on gamification. It seems to be something brands are really struggling with, especially with regard to making sure that it is right and relevant for their audience. When you look at customer loyalty programs, there is a belief that many programs are very similar. This quote unquote see of sameness within programs. Is that something you see in the industry in general, and how can brands address that?
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah. So that's definitely a problem and we come across these kind of problems from our clients. It's also because of the rapid commoditization of technology and products. It's so very easy to build features nowadays.
Manoj Agarwal:But some of our recommendations to the brands has been number one make it hyper personalized experience for your customers across the value chain of the loyalty program. Because once you make it personalized then you don't find it same because the loyalty program for customer A will be different from customer B, so you you automatically bring uniqueness into your program. The second thing which we have seen is how do you bring your catalog very fresh and wide, that instead of giving them the same limited options, let them choose the options which they want and beat as wide as possible. And the third thing is how can you make your programs very self-serve and agile so that the loyalty program manager doesn't have to wait for six months or one year to make changes? He should be able to go to the dashboards, look at some data points and make some changes as per what the data says and what the customers are saying, so that you are very agile in your changes.
Mark Johnson:Okay, is there a current trend or new technology, or even an idea that you believe is most important for brands to be considering today, to be focusing on today?
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah, and then it's the same trend which is going across the entire technology industry and I don't have to repeat that which is LLM and AI. Again, in the loyalty industry, I see very high uses of AI models and learning models. I won't say that the industry is still ready to provide these kind of models to the clients, but, for example, we are doing a lot of inroads and we are building a lot of features around AI capabilities into our product. Where how can we reduce the mundane task of the administrators and do it through AI? For example, recommendations or upsell to the customers, or cross-sell to the customers, or micro event notifications, or your rule engine optimization, because the rule engine is the backbone of any loyalty program. So how can you optimize your rule engine with the help of AI? So I would say that AI and anything to do with machine learning would be very big in the loyalty industry for the next few years.
Mark Johnson:Okay, when you work with brands and you understand kind of where they are in their journey, what they're looking to do is there one piece of advice that you would share with brands who are looking to improve their customer loyalty or customer experience strategies.
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah, so one of my recommendations would be that give a truly authentic customer centric loyalty experience. I mean, a lot of brands tend to cut corners when it comes to providing the loyalty experience, but I would say that both go fully into the customer shoes and then provide a loyalty experience the way you would like to experience it. And if you are able to crack that, then I'm very sure that the loyalty program will start working with that brand.
Mark Johnson:What can Loyalty 360 do to help you, potentially, and other brands in the industry? Regarding customer loyalty and experience, what can we do to help the industry?
Manoj Agarwal:Yeah. So first of all I'd like to thank Loyalty 360, because you are one of the unique, I would say, community who is helping this entire industry. So you are already doing a fabulous job. But some of the things which you might consider is how can you also bring some of the failures of loyalty industry in front of all of us, because we always keep talking about the success. But if you can also bring forward what are the programs which failed and why they failed, then that can be a great learning for the entire industry. So that is one thing which can be very helpful. And the second thing is a lot of times we come across clients where they want some subject matter expertise to build their own loyalty programs, because they don't have that kind of an expertise in house. So if you can help build some sort of a community where somebody who is looking for that expertise can pick up somebody from that community on a commercial basis that can really help these brands to launch their loyalty programs.
Manoj Agarwal:And then one more area which we have sometimes got it from our clients is that is there any benchmarking data which can be provided to the customers? Because if I am running my loyalty program I am aware of only my data. But if there is any data which can come from the industry and then it can be benchmarked, then that can give us some learnings that, okay, where am I standing against my competitor or my industry?
Mark Johnson:Absolutely so I tell you, we do have a job board. It's mostly US based, but someone on the team get back to you for that. So we have brands, our member brands, post openings they have. So if you have a client who wants to post, we post that. And then I think we have a resume board as well. So we need to add some functionality to that. That we do have and we do a lot of that.
Mark Johnson:And then, when it comes to benchmarking data, we just launched a little metric study. We spent the whole summer we rolled out a new advisory board and a new set of committees. We had about 40 brands going to narrow down the top 22, 25 different metrics. So we're going to be working on that next. So again, we have, you know, 100, some members growing, and the metric benchmarking study is very important. So that that'll be a big piece for us in 24. We hope you most of the first report, done, research, done this next month, perfect. And then the last thing we have is our quick fire question. So what's your favorite word? Yeah, so that's a tricky one.
Manoj Agarwal:But one word which I use a lot every morning during my yoga practices is oh. It's a Sanskrit word pronounced as oh. So that's my favorite word?
Mark Johnson:What does it mean.
Manoj Agarwal:It means how you connect yourself with the super power, with the Almighty. So it's a. It gives you peace, it gives you that inner strength and power, and then it's a good word to start your mornings.
Mark Johnson:Okay excellent and what is your least favorite word?
Manoj Agarwal:Okay, so one word which people like you and me keep coming across our work is ASAP, as soon as possible. So I need this ASAP. Can you do this for me ASAP, so, and then nothing can be done Asap, right, I mean, everything takes time. So I really hate this word.
Mark Johnson:Okay, interesting, but what excites you?
Manoj Agarwal:I typically love to spend time with my family and friends. So I think that is my point of happiness. If I get a good time with my family and friends, I think I'm very happy.
Mark Johnson:Okay, what do you find tiresome? What? What doesn't excite you?
Manoj Agarwal:So when, when things are not of good quality, I don't enjoy that. I enjoy quality. So if I if I'm going to a restaurant, I will typically expect that the restaurant will give me good quality food. So if something is not of quality, it kind of puts me off.
Mark Johnson:Okay, what is your favorite type of loyalty reward incentive?
Manoj Agarwal:Any day experiences and travels or something, because that's memorable, that that stays with you. Everything else is very transactional.
Mark Johnson:Okay, what profession, other than the one you're in right now, would you like to try?
Manoj Agarwal:So I always I mean keep thinking about how can technology do social good? So once I retire from this current business, I will definitely do something which is for the social good. So how can you use technology for the larger social good? That is something which I would like to pursue.
Mark Johnson:Excellent, and what profession would you not like to try?
Manoj Agarwal:So you would see a lot of products nowadays which are doing very well as a business. I mean they are making billions of dollars but end of the day, they are not good for the human. I mean they are very addictive products. So I mean anything which brings addiction, whether it is kids or adults, whether it is a software product or a mobile app or a e-table or anything. I think I would strongly don't do those kind of things.
Mark Johnson:Okay, who inspired you to be the person you are today?
Manoj Agarwal:My parents, my school teachers. I think I owe to them.
Mark Johnson:Okay, and what do you typically think about at the end of the day?
Manoj Agarwal:So as entrepreneurs and founders, we sometimes get into situations which are not very good for the other person. So sometimes I feel bad if I heard somebody with my words or my email or anything else. So I think when I sleep in the night. I sometimes it comes to my mind that did I hurt somebody today? And if he has, then why did I hurt that person? So that is something which comes to my mind.
Mark Johnson:Okay, and how do you want to be remembered by your friends and family?
Manoj Agarwal:Something who is dependable. I mean they can depend on me.
Mark Johnson:That's awesome. Well, thank you very much, Manoj, for taking the time to talk to us today. It was great getting to know you a little bit more, and also more about Xoxod ay and some of the things that you are doing within the customer loyalty, customer experience industry, and look forward to hearing more from you and your team in the upcoming year. Also thank you very much for everyone taking time to listen today. Make sure you join us back for another edition of loyalty lives soon, and until then, have a wonderful day.