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Leaders in Customer Loyalty: Industry Voices | Loyalty Engineering in Action: How Dash Solutions is Revolutionizing Payments to Drive Customer Engagement

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In the current world of customer loyalty, payments and incentives are no longer just transactional, they are foundational elements that shape how customers feel about a brand. For Vince Chiofolo, Senior Vice President of Revenue Strategy at Dash Solutions, the future of loyalty lies in marrying seamless payments with meaningful engagement. 

“You can have the best product, service, and price,” Chiofolo explains, “but the payment experience should also be best-in-class.”  

Dash Solutions, a fintech pioneer with nearly 30 years of experience, is reshaping how brands deliver rewards and payments. By replacing slow, outdated processes like mailing paper checks with digital, real-time payment options, Dash Solutions makes it easier and faster for businesses to pay customers and employees, while boosting engagement. 

“At Dash, our rally cry is ‘make payments mean more,’” Chiofolo says. “We don’t just process payments; we create experiences that motivate behavior and foster loyalty.” 

Speaker 1:

Good afternoon, good morning, mark Johnson from Loyalty360. Hope everyone's happy, safe and well. Want to welcome you back to our Leaders and Customer Loyalty series. This is our Industry Voices podcast. On this episode we're going to be hearing from Vince Ciafollo. He's a Senior Vice President of Revenue Strategy at Dash Solutions. Vince, how are you today?

Speaker 2:

I'm doing good. It's great to be here great.

Speaker 1:

Thank you very much for taking the time. For those who may not be familiar, can you give us a brief introduction to dash solutions, what you guys do, how you do it?

Speaker 2:

sure. So dash solutions is a long-standing company that's bringing innovation and payments to the world of FinTech and engagement, so we deliver digital payment and engagement solutions that help companies save money and motivate behavior. So, for example, we replace checks with a modern digital payment vehicle that scales. We help companies turn rewards and recognition into something that people actually care about and actually works to drive engagement. And, as we say in our rally cry at Dash, we make payments mean more and we make rewards more rewarding.

Speaker 1:

Okay, excellent. We talked a little bit prior to this interview about some of the things that you're doing, some of the kind of changes or challenges that exist within the industry. You talked about kind of the demise of checks for payments, potentially incentives or in recognition programs. You know what does Dash Solutions or how is Dash Solutions bringing some of these solutions on the payment side to save money and behavior, to help those within the industry?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So we've been working with major brands on payments for more than 30 years and what you start to see is a company can deliver a really incredible customer experience. They can have the best products at the best price and standout service. They can have the best products at the best price and standout service and still, you know you can lose loyalty with just one bad payment experience, and a lot of people would underestimate that.

Speaker 2:

It may be, you know, paying out a rebate that's difficult or confusing to redeem, or it might be, you know, a refund payment that just never shows up because it's a physical check going in the mail. So what we try to do at Dash is provide the opposite. Rather than a poor payment experience that can sabotage an overall customer experience, we provide an engaging payment and reward experience to our customers that they can provide to theirs, and so that means everything from businesses paying people faster and more efficiently and more flexibly to powering incentive and reward programs that actually drive results. So I would say that we cracked a code on how to bring payments and engagement together in a really meaningful way, and then we back it up with really great service that actually delivers.

Speaker 1:

Okay, can you tell us about your role within the organization?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so for a bulk of my background I've been a B2B marketer that's been focused on marketing operations and demand generation and really the science behind marketing and eventually for me that served as a springboard into early revenue operations as RevOps started to become a thing in business culture and ultimately, as that, paired with leadership, the diversity of background really kind of lent to a role in just general growth, which is what my role is at Dash today is leading revenue operations and sales enablement and middle market sales and just overall go-to-market strategy. And then, you know, outside of Dash right, I try to serve the industry how I can. So I sit on the board of the Incentive Marketing Association as well as serve as board president of, you know, a group called the IESP, the Incentive Engagement Solution Providers, which is a strategic industry group beneath the IMA.

Speaker 1:

Okay, yeah, and we saw a press release recently and you stated that the loyalty market is projected to exceed 24 billion by 2030. You know what key trends or technologies are driving this boom and you know how are brands adapting and also, maybe, how are some brands struggling.

Speaker 2:

So this was a topic that came up at the Incentive Marketing Association Summit, which is, just, you know, earlier this month in Austin, where you know we reveal some stats where we dug into how fast the loyalty market is really, you know, generating and growing $2 billion in market size or value and more recently has jumped to about $11.4 billion. So it's about a 16% CAGR and now has projections of clearing $24 billion by 2030. And that's pulled from credible sources like Fortune and Forrester and more. So, yeah, loyalty is on a nice tear and the growth really isn't random, right. We talked about in the meeting is it's being pushed by an appetite to influence purchasing behavior through smarter loyalty infrastructure, right, formal technology and real platforms and really the science and structure behind loyalty. And all of that appetite is driving some real, noticeable shifts, right. So one key driver is personalization, right, making loyalty work better by making it more personal. So companies are leaning further into personalization and leaning further away from things like generic discounts, right, to gain loyalty. So those types of things are falling out of favor for more personalized experience in turning communications more personal and creating reward experience that are tied to the actual user and their behavior. It's also fueled by a lot of just platform growth right, like you heard the numbers before, the number of loyalty platforms in the market has more than doubled in the past five years to more than 350 platforms today. And so, beyond just personalization, right, the platforms are just making loyalty smarter with formal technologies and integration right. Smarter, faster, more trackable and, importantly, more easy to justify investments into loyalty than it's ever been before.

Speaker 2:

And then, lastly, I think there's a whole bunch of things I can mention, but the last driver is integration, and I referenced it a bit earlier.

Speaker 2:

But loyalty is becoming more pervasive through integration and more ingrained in just consumer culture. And one example is just payments right, I mentioned payments before. We're seeing payments and loyalty blending together in a more significant way, right. So loyalty tied directly into the payment flow, right, things like co-branded cards, wallets, buy now, pay later, apps, digital disbursement tools, so it's now more structures that are starting to bolster loyalty. And, additionally, we're seeing ecosystems where two brands are working together, integrating their loyalty programs together. So purchasing more Starbucks may get you more Chase Ultimate Rewards and taking more Ubers may get you more Chase Ultimate Rewards, right, and taking more Ubers may get you more Delta SkyMiles. So you know, I saw recently, the average US consumer is now enrolled in about 17 different loyalty programs and I think that number will just continue to rise as the world of loyalty becomes more integrated, you know, smarter, better, faster and just more ingrained into a regular consumer habit and culture.

Speaker 1:

Excellent. Yeah, it's definitely a very interesting time. Customer loyalty we have a growing brand membership, vendors, suppliers, the interest in customer loyalty. We call it leaning into customer loyalty. The brands that are leaning into customer loyalty are the ones that are doing well. They have different paradigms, they have different reporting structures, they have organizational buying, which can be a big challenge as well, and one of the things that they are doing well and I think you talked about it in a recent press release is, as they lean into customer loyalty, it's really leveraging that first-party data either the transactional data they have, either the zero they may have. It's that first party data engine that is so rich and more and more CFOs are really seeing that value. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in regard to how brands may be kind of adapting or adopting new processes to look at that data and frame it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I'll actually start by going way back on this one, right? So my first brush with working with loyalty was actually when I was 15 years old and was a part-time cashier at a CVS pharmacy. And you know, if you've ever been to a CVS, you know they've been very big on loyalty and were, you know, one of the big early adopters and you know, of course, as one of the youngest of the teenage staff working at CVS, it consigned me to the cash register. So you know, in the time I was working there, in three years I've rung up tens of thousands of people and every person I rung up I asked the question, right, that everybody's heard, if you shopped at a CVS is do you have an extra care card? And admittedly, I didn't know why I was really asking the question. I was just told to as part of the script, but you know, it took probably more time than I realized that it wasn't just to make couponing easier or to hand out discounts. You know I was a party to data collection, right. The card wasn't to give away discounts. Scanning the card was really assigning an identity to the shopping behavior and then feeding the loyalty machine.

Speaker 2:

And in these days, I think more and more brands have adopted that type of approach, right? Loyalty programs aren't just handing out points and perks anymore, like a lot of them once were. They're becoming really valuable first party data engines in a tool stack where the consumer data is really born and then exposed to the business to use in a valuable way. And it may seem on the surface that that's like a little bit sinister, right? Hey, you're collecting my customer data, but it's surprising to see how willing customers are to give it up. So just to cite, you know, the Salesforce study that was run recently. It showed 80% of consumers say that they're more likely to share personal data with a brand if that means a more personalized experience and more personalized offers. So that means now loyalty is less about just transactional rewards and more about building these types of ecosystems where every scan and every transaction kind of feeds the loop that you know. We're collecting data to create more personalized shopping experience, to generate more loyalty.

Speaker 1:

And then right back to the beginning, yeah, I think that that's interesting as well, and one of the biggest challenges is the training right. Training is definitely changing within those organizations that are doing customer loyalty well. It's more of a focus. They realize it's not, you know, kind of a one-time thing. During orientation they are focusing on the kind of continual training and the importance of it. But also they have advocates within the kind of the store systems, either at the store level or regional trainers, that if they're running promotions, if they are rolling out a new promotion or if they're maybe even rolling out a new kiosk which many brands are doing, especially on the grocery side to combat digital legislation concerns that are out there they have someone that's committed to the organization, to the training around customer loyalty. And so I think again, this dichotomy between brands who truly understand customer loyalty and those who don't, that's kind of one telling factor.

Speaker 2:

That's right. There's an embrace there of loyalty that there wasn't there before. So, more than just it being present, right, it's really ingrained into more business culture and operating rhythm than we've ever seen before.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you have a framework I read about in your press release talked about loyalty engineering, which has structural, emotional, behavioral pillars. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Break that down a little bit? And obviously emotion is something that brands are focused on. Are they over indexing on kind of that emotional focus?

Speaker 2:

So likely? Yes, I think most brands default to emotion because it's the most visible, right, and it's the easiest to say romanticize. You know it's purpose. It's storytelling and customer love, right, it's creating a vibe for an organization that makes, you know, building affection between brand and customer more viable, more present, and it does right. I think it is important and there's a lot of studies that back that up. But what I think we see more and more is that emotion without solid infrastructure is a house of cards, right? So just to shout out a few brands right, which you'll probably be able to see what these have in common. But you know, blockbuster, toys R Us, radio Shack, borders, right, these are all brands that have a lot of love and I think proof is in the pudding that they're not around anymore, but people still romanticize those brands and how much they love them. I don't think we stopped loving them. We just stop showing up, right? So the question is, which of those really defines loyalty? Brand love gets you, I think, only so far if it's not both structured and then does not have ingrained behavioral habit formation. So it gets to. You know what those three pillars are, right?

Speaker 2:

In addition to the emotional loyalty, it's really creating structural loyalty and then creating behavioral loyalty in the form of habit loops, you know, keep a customer coming back because maybe it doesn't make sense to leave. Maybe they have points with a loyalty program that if they walk away they lose those points, or maybe it's, you know, outside of points. Maybe it's if I can leave my bank and go bank at another one, but I've got my direct deposit set up with this one, I better go back. I got to go to my HR team. Like all these structures create roots and make it a little harder to leave.

Speaker 2:

And when you layer in right the last one of behavioral right, it's just ingraining a brand into the day-to-day habits of a consumer in a way that's really simple and easy and frictionless right. So I think the prime example literally the amazon prime example is one click ordering, right. If it's, if it's just super, super easy to do, that it could just be part of your seamless daily habits. Um, and there are structures that keep you around and you love the brands, then you've got the trifecta and it almost doesn't make sense for you to even consider leaving if you have all three of those things.

Speaker 1:

No, absolutely, and I think that's you know. Another challenge too with emotional loyalty is that, at least from our perspective within, you know the customer loyalty. You know providers. There's many different ways to do it and you know different providers have different processes, whether it's status, half and reciprocity or there's different pillars, and it makes it very difficult for brands who have kind of an interest in looking at emotional loyalty. You know be able to compare and contrast the different providers. But you know the processes. They work if there's commitment. But, to your point, making sure that there's a focus on operational excellence in the organization, having a great brand and being able to listen to and understand their customers, I think are, you know, kind of table stakes. And those brands who do that and do it well, you know have kind of deeper emotional loyalty.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think you know said differently right, the value is driving the love, right more than maybe a story is driving the love. So you know, the two ladder right pillars that I mentioned the structural and the behavioral right, if I've got a lot of good roots in there that make it hard to leave and it's making my life easier and adding convenience and value that may make me love the brand and create an emotional connection more than a story or positioning or anything else. So you know the three really do truly work together.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. And a couple of last questions. You talked about churn. Churn is a metric that we measure every year. We've done a logometric study it's going to be three years in a row for our members and churn can be active, passive, because often customers will leave and they won't even tell you right and understanding if they're price sensitive or not. It's a big piece. You know how can brands be kind of on point when it comes to you know, churn and being able to identify it and being able to, you know, address it before it happens.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean as far as revenue growth is concerned. Right, holistically, there's two ways to achieve growth in revenue. Right, it's adding and winning more new customers and then it's keeping the ones you already have. Right so there's more cachet. Of course, in winning new customers, it sounds better in headlines, but fewer, I think, give churn the attention that it needs. And you know like the term silent killer is often aligned with churn, which I think is a really, really accurate one, because it ends up sneaking up on brands while they may be busy celebrating more of the vanity metrics right on the top end new signups and new revenue and impressions.

Speaker 2:

While the threat of churn, right it's, it's not a groundbreaking revelation. I think everybody understands that churn is dangerous, but when you start to look at the numbers and how it compounds, it becomes more significant, right. So a 5% monthly churn rate, which may sound manageable on paper and rather benign to a business, wipes out 46% of your customer base within a year, right? So if you drop that churn down to just 2%, right, it's still 20% that you're wiping out of the business, and you know, of course, that that hurts. Right, to lose customers. But it hurts even more when you realize you have to make up those customers right, by putting more pressure and cost on new customer acquisition. And the reason why it's truly silent is it often gets masked in the growth number, right? So if your churn is embedded in a net revenue retention number and you're actually winning more customers than you're losing, net revenue retention is positive. Right. So it may look good without realizing like there's a real leak at the bottom of the boat. So if it's not optimized, right, that means there's going to be a lot of cost and pressure and new resource, right. Maybe development and positioning to try to make up for the hole, just to break yourself even before you start to see, to see, growth.

Speaker 2:

So you know the numbers and the stats are truly staggering in SAS, right it's. It's even worse, right. So the numbers that I've seen. One study a one% to 2% drop in annual churn in a SaaS business right. So a drop in churn, right, improving the rate by 1% or 2% can increase a company's valuation by 12% over a five-year period, right. So I think folks are getting a little smarter to it, investors are getting smarter to it. Wall Street is kind of wisening up to looking at, you know, beyond the high level metrics more to. You know the full, the full equation and you know it's causing companies to have to react. So in the safeguarding against churn there's really no silver bullet, right, like hey, you know, launch this retention strategy and it'll work for every business. Or, you know, just add this awesome tool to your tool stack and you'll start to see churn reduce.

Speaker 2:

It's really a process flow of as simple as just tracking, diagnosing and then solving. So step one in tracking is just visibility into the business, track churn and even alongside churn, contraction, right, meaning current revenues customers you may not be losing, but their revenue per customer might be depleting, lower utility or downgrades. I think the gold standard for churn. It depends on the industry, but in most cases it's kind of keeping it under 1%. And if it's up there by 5% and you're seeing that in your business, then you realize you might be unsustainable without massive costs for acquisition to make up for it. So visibility, right, step one. Step two in diagnosing it is, you know, understanding what the signals are right and seeing hey, you know we've got this problem. It's like going to the doctor, right it's? They're not just going to give you a solution. You got to kind of track the problem, diagnose it and then get a good solution. That's tied to those things. So you can look at behavioral signals and trends you can look at are there rises in certain types of support tickets? Are there certain specific customer segments or demographics where the churn is concentrated, where maybe something's going on in that segment? But if you could pinpoint where the problem is, you know it's the second step to being able to solve it. And then when you look to solve it right, that's really step three. Once you've pinpointed it, you know it's.

Speaker 2:

I always like to preach vision before solutions. Right, it's really hard to come up with a solution if you don't have visibility into the problem. So good, smart people and they understand what the problem is and where it is can then start to decide. You know how do we pull the different retention levers to be able to solve this Right.

Speaker 2:

So it might be price sensitivity. So it might be price sensitivity. There might be something around messaging. So I think it's important to look everywhere. It's important to timeline right the business and look at, you know, was the spike in churn something that occurred last August? And what happened around that time? Did we, you know, increase prices on customers? Did we change our messaging or our loyalty strategy and then you can start to really lean in and solve for those. But it's very rarely one common solution because there's so many different variables that can go wrong. So it's just running that right process of being a good student of your own business and a good analyst of your own business and finding where the problems are and then coming in with a good, strong solutions to try to overcome them, to get better attention, better results.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely yeah. Is it definitely looking at the right metrics and understanding kind of how those metrics impact the organization? Is that imperative? And again, brands are kind of leaning into customer loyalty. They're saving the best offers, incentives, communication for their customers and they realize how important it is. And moving away from that constant replacement methodology and acquisition methodology, just how can you get the most out of your current customer set and how can you maximize that? I think the brands that are doing customer loyalty well are excelling in those arenas. And last question I have for you what trends do you think will continue to game steam for customer loyalty, customer engagement, in 2025? And what may fade off a little bit?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it's really hard to escape AI, right? So at the most recent IMA summit, I moderated a panel on AI and incentives and engagement and there was a full room and everybody was interested in it and you know, the most common interest around AI as it relates to loyalty programs and incentive programs is really AI-driven personalization, ai-driven real-time rewards, right. So if somebody is in a program and you can see from their behaviors that they tend to redeem for a certain type of reward, that's very strong information that you can have. Having the data is great, but then AI helps you to exercise the data, to be able to personalize more and tailor and target more. You know, paid loyalty tiers driven by AI, right, is something that people are really interested in as well. And then just value-based programs that are tied to sustainability or social impact is just another trend that I think we were hearing a lot about, you know, in this past summit.

Speaker 2:

Some of the things that are fading are probably all. The things that have been fading for a little while now are just seeing a more steep decline. It's things like points for purchase only, models providing things like discounts for loyalty versus, you know, rewards that are a little bit more engaging and create a rewarding experience for the recipient. Any programs or loyalty strategies that are one size fits all right, this works for one company, so it's going to work for another company. Everything is getting configured and I think you know machine learning and AI is making it even more personal and configurable, so that's definitely seeing a ramp.

Speaker 2:

And then any kind of clunky models that are difficult to use, that don't have a great user experience, things that feel like it's 2013,. Right, those are fading really, really fast. And I think you know B2B programs are really starting to learn from B2C and even B2C loyalty programs are learning from other B2C types of platforms, because people come, you know, to these types of loyalty programs. They're interested in having it behave like what they're used to, which is social media apps or, you know, retail websites or Amazon. So you know a lot of platforms and a lot of loyalty programs are having to adapt very quickly to, you know, satisfy. You know those high bars on user experience and how programs behave and how personalized they are, you know, to keep up to what they're seeing in other, more retail like experiences.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely well, vince, thank you very much for taking the time to join us today. It was great getting to know you a little bit also. It was, uh, hearing, great to hear more about some things that dash is is doing in the industry to help kind of address and, you know, promote customer loyalty and kind of engage in best practices. Very informative interview and thank you very much for taking the time to join us today.

Speaker 2:

Appreciate you having me.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, and thank you everyone for taking the time to listen. Make sure you join us every Tuesday for the next edition of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty series on the industry voices side. Until then, have a wonderful day.