Customer Experience drives successful loyalty programs

Customer experience (CX) has a huge part to play in customer loyalty. You could have a brilliant product offering, but if the user has to jump through hoops to get what they want, it’s likely to put them off returning in future. If your user experience is outstanding, however, it could be the catalyst to keep customers coming back for more. 

To ensure you create a good user experience, you need to understand your customers, know what resonates with them, and engage with them on their terms. 

User experience, insight and customer loyalty 

There are many ways you can formulate a loyalty initiative that delivers outstanding customer experience, and AND Digital is well versed in doing this. For example, we’ve worked with Avios to develop their loyalty scheme, which boosted their customer retention and led to loyalty initiatives becoming synonymous with Avios in the aviation industry. More recently, we worked with ASDA to deliver their brand-new, ‘Rewards’ programme, which embraces a new approach to customer loyalty and is being trialled in stores now. 

To find out more about how we’ve helped brands take loyalty from concept to reality, why not download our whitepaper “Exploring customer loyalty in the ecommerce era”? Get practical tips and guidance on how to keep customers at the heart of your organisation to foster loyalty.

While loyalty programmes can take many forms, there is one essential underpinning to any execution: you need to have a clear research and insight strategy. To develop this, you first need to understand your target audience. Here are the tools at your disposal.

Tracking and analytics

Your website or app holds a wealth of information on your audience, so don’t forget to harness these insights using analytics. You can integrate click and movement tracking tools – such as Hotjar or ContentSquare – to help you find bugs, identify issues and monitor any key drop-off points on your site which could be impacting customer retention. You can even see who’s interacting with your newsletter and email campaigns to identify who your most loyal customers are. These insights are key to helping you build a loyalty initiative that works for your target audience. 

Remember, analytics tell you the ‘what’, but not the ‘why’. This means you shouldn’t use analytic data in isolation, but conduct qualitative research in tandem to help you see the whole picture. 

User interviews 

There’s no better way to find out what customers think than by talking directly to them. They’ll be able to share insight on what they like about your product and what their frustrations are – the information you need to develop a strategy around what to change, iterate and improve to increase repeat purchases and encourage customers to choose you over your competitors. 

Focus groups 

By carefully recruiting a group of your target customers and facilitating open conversations about your product, you can garner great insights straight from the horse’s mouth. Together, the group can discuss their thoughts about your brand offering – what they expect and their ideas for improvement. Conducting group sessions can provide broader insight into your audience which can feed directly into your research and insight strategy. 

Learn more: Conversational user interfaces: the future of UX?

Competitor analysis

Keeping an eye on the competition is key to customer loyalty. To maintain loyalty, customers need to pick you over your competitors continually, so you need to know what’s on offer elsewhere – what your competitors are doing well, and what you can be doing better. 

Creating touchpoints with your customers and target audience is crucial to understanding their needs. Without this insight, it’ll be more difficult to resonate with your audience and reduce potential pain points in their journey – which could negatively impact customer retention and reduce brand loyalty. But by keeping the customer at the heart of everything you do, and creating a loyalty strategy around customer experience design, research and insight, you’ll not only meet their needs, but exceed their expectations – helping to build trust and boost loyalty. 

If you are seriously thinking about customer loyalty, why not download our free whitepaper “Exploring customer loyalty in the ecommerce era” which explore the origins of loyalty, the metrics for success and some tips on how to implement a successful customer loyalty program based on our work with ASDA and Avios.