How Loyalty Programs Can Improve the Customer Experience
The importance of technology in elevating your business cannot be overstated. In our previous post, Everything You Should Know About Contactless Payments, we discussed how technology is constantly being developed to make the user experience better, and how the growing popularity of contactless payments speaks to this. But, if you find that doing so is not enough to bolster your business, loyalty programs are another great option to make your user experiences better (and in fact, loyalty programs can even be integrated with contactless mobile apps!).
You’re doing your business a disservice if you don’t offer a rewards program yet. Loyalty points and rewards programs are tested and proven initiatives in business. They don’t just increase sales—they also create a more personalized, easier, and delightful experience.
Here’s why you should look into launching a loyalty program:
Collect Valuable Data
Data is crucial to expanding your business. After all, you need to know who your customers are and how they behave in order to appeal and cater to them better. Entrepreneur notes that a customer loyalty program can help you easily garner pertinent data. Fortunately, 56 percent of consumers are willing to share data if it means that they would receive a better service in return. Offering an amazing loyalty program does not only mean you get to collect data that you can use to sell more services, but it’s also a way to acquire more knowledge about your market in order to design a better customer experience.
Show Customers That You Care
Loyalty programs are also a way of showing your customers that you truly care. And, one way in particular that companies are demonstrating this is by helping customers to make better financial decisions. For example, credit card companies are famous for promoting unhealthy consumerist behavior that can often lead customers into bad financial situations. However, Petal Card explains how modern credit card companies have started to turn this model on its head by rewarding customers for responsible spending through their loyalty programs. This creates a much better level of trust between the customer and the company as they can see that you care about more than just their wallet.
Create a Heightened Experience
As a business, your main goal—in addition to meeting your bottom line—is ensuring a memorable customer experience. A feature by Forbes points out that in an oversaturated market, it’s simply not enough to have excellent customer satisfaction—you need to make customers ecstatic and excited to spread the word about what you do and offer. One way to do this is by providing a bit of preferential treatment to program members who have remained loyal, just like Marriott Rewards does for its user base. Marriott’s loyal members are able to check into their rooms online and even use the mobile app as a room key as part of their perks. While it may seem trivial, conveniences like this can do wonders in creating a heightened customer experience that they will remember.
Encourage Customer Referrals
If your loyalty program rewards customers for referring their friends and family, they are more likely to spread the word about you. In this way, you’re also providing a dual-sided reward mechanism in which both the referrer and their referral benefit from the process. Think of it as word of mouth marketing. Since customers can only refer friends who could be interested in what you have to offer, you can inflate your user base even further. In fact, if this initiative works for you, you may even generate more sales than you would by employing traditional paid advertising methods. With a customer referral feature built into your loyalty program, you’re rewarding not just your current customer, but future ones too.
Interested in setting up a loyalty program? Reach out to us today to learn more about our POS integrations and gift card processing options that make it a breeze to manage customer engagement and payment activity all in one place!
