Head of Myer One Shows Why It’s the World’s Best Loyalty Programme (#695)

Rob: As we went into 2019, the Myer business, once big, glorious behemoth of Australian retail, had really started to lose its way.

Rob: Myer One sales were declining six times faster than non-loyalty sales, which almost defeats the purpose of having a loyalty program.

Rob: Our TAG rate had dropped to its lowest levels since the program had launched.

Rob: It was sitting at just 68% for the total business and just 45% online.

Rob: They’ve built over 56 proprietary models with multiple different sub-models that sit underneath each that are using over 100 million data points.

Rob: We won best use of data and analytics and loyalty, which was our third consecutive win, which is one we’re incredibly proud of.

Rob: We won best loyalty industry transformation for the transformation journey we’ve been on over the last five years and the great results that the team delivered.

Rob: We won international loyalty program of the year for the APAC region, which was our third consecutive win.

Rob: And then of course, the really special one for us and the big award of the night, we won international loyalty program of the year for the global category.

Amanda: Hello and welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, a show for loyalty marketing professionals.

Amanda: I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, where we feature insightful conversations with loyalty professionals from the world’s leading brands.

Amanda: Today’s episode is hosted by Amanda Cromhout, the founder of Truth and International Loyalty Consultancy.

Amanda: She’s also the author of the book Blind Loyalty, 101 Loyalty Concepts Radically Simplified.

Amanda: Enjoy.

Amanda: Hi, I’m Amanda Cromhout, founder of Truth Loyalty and author of Blind Loyalty.

Amanda: On today’s Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV show, I’m interviewing Rob Pope.

Amanda: Rob is GM of customer at Myer.

Amanda: Myer is Australia’s second largest apparel brand, and their loyalty program, Myer One, is 21 years old this year.

Amanda: But most remarkably, Myer One is the most decorated, most awarded loyalty program from the International Loyalty Awards this year.

Amanda: They walked away with four awards, but most notably, the global award, best program in the world.

Amanda: So what a privilege to speak to Rob.

Amanda: He talks through the transformation Myer One has been through over the last six years and the results that his team, his team of 80 individuals deliver.

Amanda: And it’s described as, Myer One is described as the beating heart or the engine room of the organization.

Amanda: Please enjoy this show.

Amanda: It’s a real delight to talk to Rob.

Amanda: There are certain people I just love to talk to.

Amanda: And today on Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, we have Rob Pope.

Amanda: He’s a GM of customer for Myer, which obviously runs the Myer One program.

Amanda: And the most interesting thing I want to just say upfront is Rob obviously clocked lots of steps at the International Loyalty Awards.

Amanda: I think he way exceeded not 10,000, 20,000 steps because they are the most decorated loyalty brand in the world coming out of the International Loyalty Awards.

Amanda: So after that introduction, Rob, welcome to Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty.

Rob: Thank you, Amanda.

Rob: Great to be here.

Rob: Great introduction.

Amanda: I’ve set you up for success, so.

Rob: I know.

Rob: What a mantle to live up to.

Amanda: So we had a wonderful discussion at Global Connect on the stage on a panel, and that was before you knew the results of the International Loyalty Awards.

Amanda: So we’ll talk about the awards a little bit later because I think that’s important to understand what it means to Myer One and how you got there.

Amanda: But let’s kick off with the first traditional question of Loyalty TV, which is what is your favorite book, your favorite read leading towards business or self-development or actually, to be honest, anything you want?

Rob: Ah, starting with a tough question.

Rob: Look, there’s so many, but the one I always come back to is Gifford Pinchot’s seminal book on Intreprenorship, which is called Why You Don’t Have To Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur.

Rob: I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the book, but I guess for me, it was a book I read during COVID and it resonated so strongly with me because it basically solidified some of the ways of working and how I lead change with my team.

Rob: So at its core, it provides a comprehensive framework for navigating things like corporate complexity, corporate bureaucracy and organizational challenges to drive innovative change at pace across the well-developed organization.

Rob: So it offers both strategic concepts as well as practical tactics for driving innovation within established organizations.

Rob: So basically, it’s guiding consensus is centered around what GIFIT calls the 10 commandments of operational thinking.

Rob: So some of them are really bold and controversial, more controversial than others.

Rob: So they need to be taken with a measured approach.

Rob: But some of the commandments like coming to work, like you’re willing to be fired each day, are potentially too bold for some.

Rob: Others like seeking forgiveness rather than permission is really important and allows you to accelerate innovation cycles at speed.

Rob: But others like working underground as long as possible, which basically teaches you how to protect fragile ideas or new innovations until they’re strong enough to survive corporate scrutiny, provide a new way of thinking and shepherding radical or innovative change through established structural organizations.

Rob: So basically what it does at its core is it encourages those with an entrepreneurial spirit to embrace rather than fight bureaucracy and teaches how to basically work around it by finding sponsors within the business, building coalitions across the business and making sure you’re timing your initiatives strategically to make sure you can shepherd them through the change in the organization.

Amanda: I do think the majority of listeners to Loyalty TV and Lets Talk Loyalty, although Paula may be able to correct me if I’m wrong, probably are still in corporate, so that’s actually a really useful insight.

Amanda: And there’s a lot of us who are independent entrepreneurs, so who tend to have that spirit not restricted as much.

Amanda: So lovely.

Amanda: Thanks, Rob.

Amanda: Lovely, lovely insight, actually, how you think and how you lead as well.

Amanda: So tell us a little bit more about Rob, because you’re leading the most decorated loyalty brand in the world.

Amanda: But from our discussion earlier, you didn’t start out at all in loyalty.

Amanda: Your background, you told me, is in law, and you even had the opportunities to come and play in Africa.

Amanda: So all sorts of journeys, not necessarily a traditional loyalty journey.

Amanda: So how do you get to be where you are leading such a phenomenal loyalty brand?

Rob: Well, I mean, the short answer is by accident or by chance, depending on how you look at it.

Rob: But yeah, as you mentioned, I was studying with, you know, my dream was to become a lawyer, and I had a really exciting opportunity to go and work in Rwanda to work with the government on supporting them with processing all of the, I guess, the perpetrators of the genocide that took place in 1994.

Rob: And just before I went off to to do that, I had a opportunity to go and do what was sold to me as a short term project down in the head office at Myer, working on the loyalty program for three months.

Rob: And I’ve been working at Myer while I was studying, working in our store in Melbourne.

Rob: And it was led by, you know, this incredible woman who led the region.

Rob: Slightly terrifying, but also incredibly inspirational.

Rob: And I still remember the day she called me.

Rob: I’d just come back actually from living in Costa Rica for 12 months with some friends.

Rob: And had taken the 12 months off studying, come back.

Rob: I’d been back about three weeks and it was a rainy February day, which is very uncommon in Australia during the summer.

Rob: And Susan called.

Rob: And usually when Susan called, it was usually a more terrifying reason.

Rob: So I wasn’t quite sure what her intention was.

Rob: Usually she’d call to tell you off or give you a chip about something that you probably hadn’t done to the best of your ability.

Rob: So I approached the call with trepidation, but I answered the call and she just basically said to me, look, there’s an opportunity to go and work on this exciting loyalty project for three months, and I would like you to go down and do it.

Rob: I was pretty hesitant at the time.

Rob: I remember saying to her, look, just gotten back from taking a break from my studies, I’m going to Africa later in the year, and I really want to devote all of my time and my attention and energy to seeing that through.

Rob: And I’ll never forget her very bold response to that, which was basically, I won’t accept no for an answer.

Rob: She basically said, you’ll go down and do this for three months because I think it’s a great opportunity for you.

Rob: She’s like, if at the end of the three months, it’s not for you, that’s perfectly fine.

Rob: You can come back here and go back to your studies and go to Africa.

Rob: She’s like, or you can leave to date because she’s like, I won’t accept someone not taking a chance and having them continue to work for me.

Rob: So I probably slightly disgruntled went down to the head office and met with the guy who was running the loyalty program at the time.

Rob: And I remember him asking me questions and on reflection, I was 19, 20, and I must have appeared like such an ungrateful brat.

Rob: I recall sitting across from him, him asking me questions like, do you know much about loyalty?

Rob: And I was like, no.

Rob: He’s like, have you ever wanted to work in the loyalty space?

Rob: And I was like, no.

Rob: He’s like, do you see a future career in loyalty?

Rob: And my response was, no, not really.

Rob: I’m going down here for three months because I’ve been politely forced, and then I’m going to go back to my studies and move to Africa.

Rob: And yeah, basically I left that day thinking, well, I definitely didn’t leave the best impression on him, so let’s see how this goes.

Rob: And he called the next day and I went down there and did my three month project and never left.

Amanda: Incredible.

Amanda: That’s so funny.

Amanda: Do you want to live?

Amanda: Do you want a career in loyalty?

Amanda: No.

Rob: No, I guess, like on reflection, you know, and I had the opportunity to catch up with Pete Ashley at the International Loyalty Awards when we’re in Dubai.

Rob: He’s working back in the UK now and, you know, perhaps they saw something that I didn’t see at the time.

Rob: But yeah, things happened for a reason, I guess.

Amanda: Well, Susan sounds like a magnificent lady to make you have done, to have made you do that.

Amanda: Terrifying and inspirational.

Amanda: There’s lots of terrifying and inspirational women in Loyalty, so you’re in safe hands.

Amanda: So let’s talk about Myer before we talk about Myer One, because as you know, Loyalty TV is a wonderfully global program, and we have listeners all over the world.

Amanda: So not everyone might know Myer as well as obviously you and your team do.

Amanda: So tell us more about Myer as an organization.

Rob: Yeah, definitely.

Rob: So I guess like awkward stories and awkward businesses, ours started with one man’s dream, basically.

Rob: So a young immigrant who was new to Australia with little money and spoke limited English named Sidney Myer started a humble door-to-door drapery business in regional Victoria during the gold rush.

Rob: And he had a dream to build a modern customer-first department store modeled on some of the great department stores that were starting to pop up in the United States and in the United Kingdom at the time.

Rob: And we’re talking the late 1800s here when Sidney emigrated to Australia.

Rob: And I guess from the ground up, he recognized an opportunity and a demand for a new way for customers to shop.

Rob: Things that probably appeared quite radical back in the late 1800s, like having open display cases, for example, as well as modern forms of customer service, as well as innovative new service models like building child care centers into the stores.

Rob: Which back in the early 1900s, for example, when he launched that, was incredibly radical.

Rob: So the business over time grew to become one of Australia’s largest and most recognized brands.

Rob: And has a significant legacy in Australia, particularly not only for the contribution that Sydney and his family had on the retail industry, but also their philanthropic efforts.

Rob: And I know, Amanda, I keep trying to convince you to come to Australia and come to Melbourne in particular.

Rob: And when you do, we’ll be able to take you on a bit of a Myer history tour of the city, because when you walk through Melbourne in particular, where Myer really kind of grew into the business it is today, you know, most of the hospital wings, most of the university wings, as well as core parts of our infrastructure are all named after Sidney Myer.

Rob: Him and his family had such a significant philanthropic impact on the community and the city and how it shaped today.

Rob: But I guess today, the Myer group and us as the custodians of Sidney’s dream essentially comprises 56 premium department stores and over 700 fashion retail outlets across over eight brands.

Rob: So we’re now the second largest manufacturer of apparel in the country, and we employ close to 20,000 Australians, turning over more than $4 billion in annual revenue.

Rob: And we’re currently Australia’s seventh most trusted brand, which is something that we hold with both immense regard, but also immense responsibility to make sure that we’re continuing to support the community and deliver on the dream that I guess Sidney built out to build back at the turn of the century.

Amanda: I’ve got goose bumps, Rob.

Amanda: I didn’t know that story.

Amanda: So I’m glad you held that back from our chat we had preparing for today.

Amanda: The goose bumps around his commitment to Australia and Australians, whether it’s hospital awards or schools or just beautiful.

Amanda: What a lovely story.

Amanda: And I’m sure that still shines through in the culture at Myer.

Rob: It sure does.

Rob: And look, like I said, when I do finally manage to convince you to come to Melbourne, I will gladly take you around the city and give you a tour.

Rob: I mean, his story is remarkable and the impact he’s had on the city and had on our retail industry in Australia is immense.

Rob: But there’s so many examples of the great work and the forward thinking that he did that still resonate throughout our business today.

Rob: I mean, a great example of that, we have a heritage listed ballroom in our Myer Melbourne store called Mural Hall that contains a number of murals that were painted by a great Australian artist called Napier Wallace.

Rob: And he had essentially, you know, fought in the trenches during World War I and had his right arm amputated.

Rob: So, when he came back from the war, Sydney commissioned him to paint a series of murals in the ballroom that all focused on celebrating women and women’s empowerment throughout history.

Rob: So, keep in mind this was, you know, the 19 late 1920s when, you know, women’s empowerment and women’s role in society wasn’t what it is today.

Rob: And you can walk through that ballroom and just, you know, see that almost shrine that Sidney and the artist created together to celebrate the critically important role of women throughout history.

Rob: It extends through to the great work he did during the Depression when he, him and his family, you know, fed people in the city that had been thrown out of their homes or lost their jobs, all the way through to World War II.

Rob: Like, there’s just incredible examples of, you know, his great spirit and, yeah, it’s a spirit that lives within the business today.

Amanda: I see why your three month, three month project extended to a career.

Amanda: So work for a company that’s led, was founded like that.

Amanda: Beautiful.

Amanda: What a lovely story.

Amanda: Thanks for sharing, Rob.

Amanda: I’m sure a lot of Australians don’t even know that story.

Amanda: So that’s wonderful insights.

Amanda: Thank you.

Amanda: So we’re going to talk now about Myer One.

Amanda: And I admitted to you in Dubai when we were about to go on stage for our panel that I have a loyalty crush on Myer One.

Amanda: And I’ve been working in this industry for many, many years and use Myer One as a program, as example of absolute excellence for various reasons.

Amanda: And then obviously later in that week, the rest of the world saw why.

Amanda: And that was great to see that celebration.

Amanda: So rather than me try and keep bigging up why Myer One is so well celebrated, tell us about it.

Amanda: Tell us, before you tell us about its performance, can you actually explain the program structure, what do customers get, what do they do?

Amanda: What is Myer One?

Rob: Myer One is essentially the beating heart of our customer first organization.

Rob: So it’s our proprietary loyalty program that now operates across the entire Myer group.

Rob: The program was founded in 2004.

Rob: So we’re celebrating 21 rewarding years this year.

Rob: And at its core, it’s basically a simple points-based loyalty program.

Rob: So our members earn two points for every dollar they spend, and for every thousand points they earn, it converts into a $10 reward.

Rob: So basically, they get 2% cash back on their spend at the Myer group.

Rob: Outside of that, it is a tier-based program.

Rob: So members are incentivized and receive various different rewards and benefits that increase in exclusivity and increase in value as they progress through the tier structure.

Rob: We have four tiers, starting with our base member tier, moving up to silver, gold, and then our platinum tier, which is by invitation only for our top 3,000 spending members.

Amanda: So I mean, I think it’s so important for everyone to understand the structure of a program to then understand what else you want to say about it.

Amanda: So tell us as much as you can around…

Amanda: You did share quite a lot with the audience in Dubai.

Amanda: Tell us as much as you can around the performance of Myer One and its impact on the Myer business.

Rob: Yeah, so today, the program is our key strategic differentiator.

Rob: Obviously, I’m biased, but we call it the strategic jewel in our crown, and it really is the engine room of our total organization.

Rob: It informs the decisions that we make across our insight-led organization.

Rob: It informs how we support, communicate, and engage with our members.

Rob: But most importantly, it drives our long-term strategic goals and focus.

Rob: But I think as we discussed, Amanda, it hasn’t always been that way.

Rob: And I think that the loyalty program and the important role that Myer One plays in our organization today, hasn’t always been the case and has been the result of years of tireless work from our incredible loyalty team and from having incredible support from our board and our executive leadership team to place not only the customer at the center of our business, but also our loyalty program.

Rob: So we talk about our latest transformation journey, as I’m sure you can appreciate.

Rob: The business is now 125 years old.

Rob: So it’s seen a lot of change and a lot of transformation.

Rob: But we talk about the most recent transformation occurring back in 2019.

Rob: So as we went into 2019, the Myer business once, big, glorious subahimoth of Australian retail, had really started to lose its way.

Rob: We’d been through successive leadership changes.

Rob: We’d undulated from various different strategies.

Rob: And during that time, we’d really lost sight of who our consumer was.

Rob: We’d gone from the heyday of department stores in Australia back in the late 2000s, when we were the one-stop shop for all of our consumers.

Rob: And we really struggled in the first part of the 2010s and the later part of the 2010s, as international competitors came in, as the rise of connected commerce and online shopping really started to proliferate the market.

Rob: And as a result, we really kind of lost our way.

Rob: We tried to go really high-end and during that journey, isolated our core customer.

Rob: And we’d also tried to undulate to the other end of the market, where we really focused on discounting and going a little bit more down market, which naturally also isolated our customer.

Rob: So where we were in late 2019 was, we were faced with quite a critical challenge.

Rob: We reported a half a billion dollar profit loss in just the preceding six months to the strategy change.

Rob: But I think more concerningly for us, from a loyalty perspective, was the Myer One program, which had always been a key strategic differentiator for us, had actually become the part of the business that was performing the worst.

Rob: So if we reflect back to 2019, Myer One sales were declining six times faster than non-loyalty sales, which almost defeats the purpose of having a loyalty program.

Rob: Our tag rate had dropped to its lowest level since the program had launched.

Rob: It was sitting at just 68% for the total business and just 45% online.

Rob: So we had a real disparity between how customers were engaging in our physical channels compared to our digital and our online channels.

Rob: New member acquisition had stagnated.

Rob: We’re requiring around 200,000 new customers a year.

Rob: But most concerningly for us, engagement in the program had reached all time lows.

Rob: So in the 12 months leading up to 2019, member visitation frequency had declined by 9% and the average spend per customer had fallen off a cliff.

Rob: It had declined by 24% in just 12 months.

Rob: So it became really clear to us that critical change and immediate intervention was required.

Rob: And in line with a change in leadership and a change in strategy across the total organization, we launched a customer first plan.

Rob: And the customer first plan really set out to do exactly what the name suggests.

Rob: It was set out to put the customer back at the center of our ecosystem.

Rob: It set out to focus all areas of the business around putting the customer back at the core of all of our decisions and being really clear, really clinical and really measured around who our customer was and what they wanted from our modern business.

Rob: And of course, a core part of that was the transformation journey that myself and the team have been on with the Loyalty program.

Rob: So for us, that started with putting the customer back at the center of our ecosystem.

Rob: So understanding what it was that the customer wanted from the Loyalty program, where their pain points were with the Loyalty program, but also what they wanted from us, what they wanted from the team and what they wanted from the business.

Rob: So we started first by bringing together all of our disparate customer data, so back in 2019, our customer data sat in multiple different systems and multiple different platforms.

Rob: So if you wanted to understand how a customer shopped online, if you wanted to understand how a customer shopped in store, and if you wanted to understand how a customer was engaging with the Loyalty program, you needed to go and consult multiple different teams and multiple different systems.

Rob: So it became really difficult to get a really clear and unified view on who our customers were and how they’re engaging with our brand.

Rob: So we first started by bringing all of our data together into one centralized data warehouse.

Rob: And that included all of our great first party data.

Rob: So all of the 20 years worth of purchasing data that we had on Myer One members, all of the digital engagement data, as well as all of the in-store data that we collected on them.

Rob: We started augmenting that with the best second and third party data that we could get our hands on.

Rob: So second party data that gave us access to things like more attitudinal and behavioral data.

Rob: So we could take a customer like yourself, Amanda, and see new attributes like what your attitudes were, what your purchasing behaviors were.

Rob: But also, I guess for us as data people, more interesting data attributes that we could use, like what your household makeup was, what your earning potential was.

Rob: Then we started to augment that with third party data.

Rob: So connecting Myer One data at a one-to-one level with external credit and debit card spend data, which gave us access to things like what people were purchasing, what our share of wallet was, but also what our market share was.

Rob: And what became really helpful for us is we were able to identify where there was opportunities for growth to unlock more value from our customers.

Rob: So we started to then take all of those great insights, we were able to garner on our members.

Rob: We started clustering them into what we call our customer value management segments.

Rob: So grouping customers into our cohorts based on the strategic job to do for each customer.

Rob: So we take our Grow cohort, for example, which are our customers that shop less than four times per annum and shop in less than three categories.

Rob: Now they’re really important metrics for us because we know if we can get a customer to six visits, we know if we can get them to more than three categories, their stickiness with our brand increases significantly.

Rob: So what that segmentation or cohort-based strategy allows us to do is identify a really clear strategic job to do for that customer, which in the case of our Grow cohort is to increase their visitation frequency and increase the number of categories that they’re shopping.

Rob: That manifests all the way up to what we call our kind of retain and recognize cohorts, which are our Silver, Gold and Platinum members.

Rob: Our Platinum members, for example, are shopping with us 76 times a year, which is more than once a week, which still blows my mind when you consider where our department is for.

Rob: How they justify buying our shoes and handbags and lipstick more than once a week, I’ll never know, but we had a few million more of them, we’d be thrilled.

Rob: We have about an 82 percent discretionary share of wallet with those customers, which is incredible.

Rob: So for every dollar they’re spending in the categories and the products that we can serve, they’re spending eight dollars and 20 cents of that at Myer.

Rob: So the strategic job to do with those customers is to obviously reward them, recognize them and retain their loyalty.

Amanda: Yeah, amazing.

Amanda: Yeah, Rob, that’s a masterclass in change management and data excellence, honestly.

Amanda: I mean, I don’t think anyone listening to how I started this interview with you could believe that in 2019, it was your worst performing department in the organization and that the organization was suffering and struggling as well.

Amanda: And what you’ve just taken us through, your customer first plan and the single view of the customer.

Amanda: I mean, there are so many organizations out there who are probably still where you were in 2019, struggling with those disparate buckets of data.

Amanda: And just listening to the commitment Myer obviously made to this is, as I said, a masterclass in change management.

Amanda: So what a privilege, I guess, for you and what an honor to be at the heart of that.

Amanda: And well done on, you’ve obviously driven that change.

Amanda: So it’s just thank you for sharing and sharing the details of the cohorts and the stickiness after, what did you say?

Amanda: Four visits isn’t enough, but you stretch them to six and you get the stickiness.

Amanda: Like, it’s just lovely to hear that level of detail.

Amanda: So fantastic.

Amanda: I think everyone’s going to be hanging on every word here.

Amanda: So obviously you can’t do this alone.

Amanda: And so you’ve very openly talked about what a magnificent team you have.

Amanda: And you shared with me, you’ve got 80 staff.

Amanda: Can you give us a sense of the structure of your organization that delivers such an outstanding customer first strategy?

Rob: Yeah, of course.

Rob: I mean, look, as you said, the change in our organization wasn’t delivered by us and us alone.

Rob: I think that the core to our success has really been evangelizing a loyalty first culture across our organization.

Rob: And that started with our board members through to our executive management team, all the way through to our more than 20,000 frontline team members that are serving our customers each and every day.

Rob: I think evangelizing why loyalty is critically important to them and contextualizing it within their role and the impact they can have was really core to our success.

Rob: But in terms of our day-to-day team, we sit within a broader customer and experience division, and we’re called the customer team, which sounds a bit strange, but basically our core function is to focus on engaging and extracting as much value from our customer as possible.

Rob: So we’re broken up into a number of different divisions.

Rob: We have our loyalty team, which is led by the most delightful human alive.

Rob: Her name is Crystal, and Crystal leads our multidisciplinary core Myer One team.

Rob: So her team is comprised of a product team that are there to essentially create all of the great benefits and deliver all of the great benefits that go out to our customers, and they manage the Myer One product.

Rob: We then have our lifecycle and engagement team that sit in that loyalty function.

Rob: Their job is to take the great benefits, the great rewards, and the great experiences that the product team is starting to develop, and they start to build out multi-faceted lifecycle journeys, and map out how we start to bring those to life for our members, how we start to measure the effectiveness of that.

Rob: We then have our member experience team who are responsible for bringing that experience to life across our organization for our members, working back with our store teams all the way through to our event and experience teams to make sure that at every touch point across our members journey, they are getting a true Myer One experience.

Rob: And then she has a strategy and commercialization team, which are constantly focused on looking into what the next evolution could look like for the loyalty program.

Rob: But also as we start to explore commercialization opportunities and the external expansion of the Myer One program, that team are core to helping shape that journey.

Rob: We then have our customer engagement team.

Rob: While the loyalty team are focused on essentially managing and extracting value from the loyalty life cycle, our customer engagement team are focused on extracting long-term value and behavioral shift from our customers across their entire journey with Myer.

Rob: So that team is broken into three core component parts.

Rob: We have our strategy team that essentially manage the great customer value management strategy that’s in place.

Rob: So constantly looking into those cohorts, understanding and identifying where there’s opportunity to drive deeper engagement or extract more value.

Rob: We then have our engagement design team, who are essentially our personalization engine room in our organization.

Rob: They’re responsible for taking the thousands of offers, the thousands of pieces of content that we want to get out to our customers on a weekly basis.

Rob: In retail, everybody wants everybody to see everything at every hour of the day to drive and drive sales conversion.

Rob: The engagement design team are responsible for curating all of the offers, all of the content to make sure that customers are getting something that is contextual, relevant and personalized to them.

Rob: And then we have our delivery team in that space that are responsible for getting all of those communications out to customers.

Rob: So building out all of those great multi-step personalized journeys and getting them out into our customers’ hands.

Rob: We then have our analytics and insights function.

Rob: So again, they’re really the engine room across our organization for providing customer-led insights back into the organization to inform all of the decisions that are happening across our business.

Rob: So we have our great campaign analytics team and our reporting team that are responsible for reporting on business performance, reporting on campaign effectiveness and suggesting optimization opportunities.

Rob: We then have our insights business partner functions.

Rob: So what we’ve done in our insights team is we’ve partnered each of our key executive streams up with an insights business partner.

Rob: And those insights business partners are responsible for sitting in on their day-to-day operations, helping them drive their strategy and understanding how we can unlock the value of our data ecosystem to help each of those executives make more informed decisions.

Rob: So sitting with our property team, for example, to understand what decisions we need to make around lease renewals or right sizing our fleet, for example, or sitting with our merchandise teams to inform insight led and customer led buying decisions, for example.

Rob: Those insight business partners have been a game changer for us in our organization around how we become a more data and customer led organization.

Rob: We then have our customer research team that are going out and doing proactive, you know, customer research with our members, but also with prospective customers.

Rob: So they do everything from focus groups through the surveys to customer shop alongs.

Rob: So we can make sure that we’ve constantly got our finger on the pulse of what’s happening with our customers.

Rob: We have a data science and AI team that are building out all of the great machine learning models that we’ve built in house, that are now partnering not only our loyalty ecosystem, but also our personalization engine.

Rob: So much smarter than me, they’re the geniuses in our group, but they’ve built over 56 proprietary models with multiple different sub models that sit underneath each that are using over 100 million data points on an individual customer each day to predict things like a customer’s propensity to lapse, for example, or what the next best product or what the next best offer might be to serve to that customer based on where they’re at in their journey in shopping with Myer.

Rob: And then we’ve also got what essentially is a capability and infrastructure team that are managing our data as a product.

Rob: So working through how we need to feed all that data in, manage the hygiene of our data, but also making sure that we’re being responsible data custodians.

Rob: We then have our financial services and partnerships team.

Rob: There’s more.

Rob: We’ve got the Financial Services and Partnerships team, which are responsible for managing all of our financial services products.

Rob: So all of our white labeled credit cards, gift cards, et cetera.

Rob: They manage all of our payments relationships with big scheme partners like MasterCard, MX, Visa and Afterpay.

Rob: They also manage all of our strategic partnerships.

Rob: So we have some deeply integrated loyalty partnerships with businesses like Commonwealth Bank, which is Australia’s largest bank, Virgin Airlines and American Express, that allow those customers to essentially utilize their loyalty currency as a form of tender at Myer.

Rob: So the financial services and partnerships team are constantly focused on building out new revenue and strategic adjacency streams.

Rob: Then last but not least, we’ve got our incredible group operations team led by the very formidable Isabel.

Rob: Nobody is a more passionate customer advocate than Isabel, but what Isabel and her team are responsible for is essentially managing all of the operations of our group function.

Rob: So they manage all of the customer service, for example.

Rob: They manage all of the great platforms and infrastructure that power our loyalty and financial services ecosystem.

Rob: Plus they manage all of the bills and the finances and make sure that none of us get arrested or fired for any bad decisions.

Amanda: Most importantly.

Amanda: I don’t think you’d look good in orange Rob.

Rob: You never know, I’ll give it a crack.

Amanda: I loved listening to how you describe the different parts of the insights infrastructure.

Amanda: So I think I shared with you in my previous life at Walworths, we used to allow our insights team to go and find the diamond in the rough.

Amanda: That just go and rummage in the data and find that insight with the category teams, with the buyers, with the actual merchandise, which was just so amazing to hear you still talk about that now.

Amanda: But I don’t think anyone could deny listening to you today that Myer One is where it is, because to be customer first, it’s data led.

Amanda: That’s the focus you’ve got on using your data and producing formidable experiences for A, the customer, but B, commercial return for Myer as a business is obvious.

Amanda: So the marriage between commercial and customer through data.

Amanda: It’s wonderful to hear.

Amanda: Unfortunately, we’re going to run out of time.

Amanda: I could just listen to you all day, because I think any of us in this industry want to hear more about brands that are doing this, because often it’s just theory, and you’re seeing it play out in real practice.

Amanda: As a judge at the International Loyalty Awards, we had the honor of hearing you present against some of those structures, the data structure, machine learning capability.

Amanda: So that leads me actually to my next point around the International Loyalty Awards.

Amanda: So we had a big laugh when we were chatting earlier, because you shared with me that you even buy a separate suitcase, or you had to buy a separate suitcase to carry your children home, you said.

Rob: We did.

Rob: Our precious cargo needed to make it all the way back from Dubai safely.

Rob: And we probably weren’t expecting to bring home quite as many awards as we did.

Rob: And yeah, we had to hop on to Amazon, which crossed my soul a little bit, because I refused to shop at Amazon in Australia, of course, to buy a suitcase to bring them all home safely, for our wonderful team who were not all able to join us in Dubai, unfortunately, but we’re incredibly excited to touch them, feel them, and celebrate when we got them safely back home to Australia.

Rob: But I think-

Amanda: Can you share with us the four separate awards that you won?

Rob: Yeah.

Rob: So we won Best Use of Data and Analytics in Loyalty, which was our third consecutive win, which is one we’re incredibly proud of.

Rob: We won Best Loyalty Industry Transformation for the transformation journey we’ve been on over the last five years and the great results that the team delivered.

Rob: We won International Loyalty Program of the Year for the APAC region, which was our third consecutive win.

Rob: And then, of course, the really special one for us and the big award of the night, we won International Loyalty Program of the Year for the global category.

Rob: So, an incredibly exciting award.

Rob: And for us, a real testament to, well, I guess, the incredible hard work that the team have done over the past five years to turn the program around.

Rob: You asked me what it meant to us and what it meant to the team.

Rob: I think, you know, we often sit in Australia and we run a loyalty program that is incredibly successful and well recognized in our market.

Rob: But Australia is a small market.

Rob: And I think what was incredible about the International Loyalty Awards and our opportunity to participate is it was a great reinforcement that the work we’re doing is, you know, world class and that the innovation we’re driving is world class.

Rob: You know, we’re able to hear from incredible brands with incredible loyalty programs that we look up to and we aspire to, like Emirates, like Tesco, like Accor, but also some of our domestic competitors, like Woolworths, for example.

Rob: I personally think their everyday rewards program is one of the best supermarket loyalty programs in the world.

Rob: So to not only be nominated, but to win against a competitor set like that, for us has been an incredible privilege and really humbling, you know, for everybody involved.

Amanda: Wonderful.

Amanda: Well, it shows the humility shows us the way you described that.

Amanda: So effectively, the most, not successful, but the most awarded and recognized program in the world.

Amanda: My last question, as I say, we’re running out of time, is what’s in the pipeline for Myer One?

Amanda: What can we wait and look forward to?

Rob: Well, it’s going to be a really big year for us at Myer One.

Rob: There’s a lot of exciting change coming.

Rob: You know, I would describe myself and the team as eternally dissatisfied and incredibly impatient.

Rob: So we’re always looking for new ways to innovate on the program and deliver more for our members.

Rob: You know, it’s going to be a huge year for us.

Rob: By the time this goes to air, we will have rolled Myer One out to another 700 retail outlets across Australia, giving our members access to earn more rewards faster with more outlets, giving us the opportunity to engage more Australians.

Rob: But probably more excitingly for us, towards the end of the year, we’re actually going to be relaunching the Myer One program.

Rob: So we’re calling it an evolution, not a revolution, because what we are doing is building on the core strengths of the program, but we’re looking to add more rewards, more benefits and new ways for our members to engage in the program that should hopefully make it even more rewarding and more engaging for each and every one of them.

Amanda: Incredible.

Amanda: Well, everyone listening will be dying to see when that’s and how that turns out.

Amanda: So, and I think as you, as we hear from global leaders in any industry, you have to reinvent yourselves while you’re on top.

Amanda: So that’s great to see.

Amanda: You’re not waiting for another moment.

Amanda: Rob, thank you so much for just your humility and your leadership in the loyalty industry and for joining us on loyalty TV.

Amanda: It’s been such a pleasure talking to you.

Rob: My absolute privilege.

Rob: Thank you for having me.

Amanda: This show is sponsored by Wise Marketeer Group, publisher of The Wise Marketeer, the premier digital customer loyalty marketing resource for industry relevant news, insights and research.

Amanda: Wise Marketeer Group also offers loyalty education and training globally through its Loyalty Academy, which has certified nearly 900 marketeers and executives in 49 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals.

Amanda: For global coverage of customer engagement and loyalty, check out thewisemarketeer.com and become a Wiser Marketeer or Subscriber.

Amanda: Learn more about global loyalty education for individuals or corporate training programs at loyaltyacademy.org.

Amanda: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty.

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