Loyalty Program Design Fundamentals Part I

If you are a loyalty program manager, most likely you will agree that a loyalty program can be an expensive exercise. Not only does it require a substantial infrastructure and a large amount of human time to support, but also once started it is difficult to pull the plug without offending customers. Therefore, it is critical to design a loyalty program so that it will encourage customer participation and achieve maximum business benefits. In this two-part series, I would like to discuss some key points in this area. In this first part, I will discuss what are the design factors that a loyalty manager should consider. Next week, I will talk about what academic research has taught us about some of the design factors.

Before continuing, I would like to acknowledge the inspiration for this topic from one of my readers in Europe, Kim Jorgensen, who had inquired me about optimal loyalty program design. The inquiry stimulated me to think more extensively about this topic and hence this series. Thank you, Kim!

Now let’s get down to business.

design blueprint
http://www.flickr.com/photos/seier/ | CC BY 2.0

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Social CRM — Opportunities and Challenges

Recently, I joined a new Google Group called Social CRM Pioneers created by two Altimeter partners Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang. There have been very interesting conversations about social CRM, what it is, what it can do, and the issues to be addressed in the area. Around the same time, these same individuals released an open report on 18 use cases of social CRM, a comprehensive analysis of how social CRM can be used in an enterprise environment (see figure below for the 18 uses). In less than a week, the report has been viewed over 15,000 times, showing the amount of interest in this topic. In this blog, I would like to offer a primer on social CRM (or sCRM for short) and discuss the opportunities and currently unresolved challenges associated with implementing sCRM in practice.

Social CRM

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