#8: Lessons from a Loyalty Expert: Leanne Papaioannou

Few loyalty professionals can boast in excess of two decades of expertise running loyalty programmes across both consumer and business brands.

Leanne Papaioannou set up “Chilli Pepper” as Ireland’s only dedicated strategic loyalty agency over sixteen years ago, to advise customer-focused clients how best to capture, understand and convert marketing insights in to loyalty programmes and customer strategies that drive true brand advocacy.

Leanne’s expertise spans fuel and convenience retail, insurance, telcos, energy and our conversation includes insightful ideas from the evolution of loyalty practices in the Irish market, through to the latest global insights on capturing and driving your net promoter score in new and useful ways.

Show Notes:

1) Glassbox brands concept:

https://trendwatching.com/quarterly/2017-09/glass-box-brands/

2) Net Promoter Score concept (NPS):

https://hbr.org/2003/12/the-one-number-you-need-to-grow

3) Customer Trends and Insights:

https://www.jwtintelligence.com/

https://trendwatching.com/

4) Forrester Research: Customer Loyalty Playbook 2019

https://www.forrester.com/playbook/The+Customer+Loyalty+Playbook+For+2019/-/E-PLA250

https://www.linkedin.com/in/leannepapaioannou/

http://www.ChilliPepper.ie

 

Audio Transcript

Paula: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty, an industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals.

Paula: I’m your host, Paula Thomas, and if you work in loyalty marketing, join me every week to learn the latest ideas from loyalty specialists around the world.

Paula: Thank you.

Paula: So today, I am delighted to be, first of all, on a personal note, recording my eighth interview.

Paula: So one of the statistics that scared me about podcasting, to be honest, when I started, was obviously the amount of work that’s involved, but also the fact that apparently 90% of podcasts never make it past the seventh episode.

Paula: So here I am recording my eighth, so I feel a sense of achievement.

Paula: And I think what makes it particularly special is that I’m sitting with somebody who I have known and worked with as a dear friend for many years in the Irish market, and her name is Leanne Papaioannou.

Paula: So I’ve been, I have to confess, practicing how to pronounce that over the last hour or so.

Paula: I probably haven’t done it justice, but I will say that Leanne is a woman who I have followed in terms of her loyalty career for the entire duration of my loyalty career.

Paula: So, I mean, I’m super proud to have a decade of loyalty experience.

Paula: Leanne has two.

Paula: Which clearly means she was a child when she started.

Paula: So very much Leanne is somebody who has worked across all industry verticals, and really, I think to me, excels in the strategy.

Paula: So understanding customers in terms of how they think, how they feel, and how you want them to think and feel.

Paula: So we’re going to have a fantastic conversation today.

Paula: I will let Leanne talk you through some of her best case studies, because there’s just too many to mention here.

Paula: But I will say that really her agency, Chilli Pepper, is still the only loyalty strategy agency in the Irish market.

Paula: Now, Leanne is originally born in Zimbabwe, moved to South Africa, and has also lived in the UK, and now 16 years in Ireland.

Paula: So in terms of the overall proposition for this show, which is Global Voices of Loyalty, Leanne absolutely fits the bill.

Paula: So delighted to be talking to her here today.

Paula: Now, as I said, I have followed Leanne for the entire decade of my experience in loyalty, and I don’t just mean on the Instagram side of things.

Paula: I literally mean that on a couple of the programmes that I worked on, Leanne was in there first, doing all the clever stuff, as I say, with the strategy, the frameworks and the thinking, and quite often then I would have been brought in to operationalise those programmes.

Paula: So we’ve worked together a couple of times and learnt a lot from each other.

Paula: So I would like to really welcome Leanne Papaioannou to Let’s Talk Loyalty.

Leanne: Thank you so much, Paula.

Leanne: It’s a delight and even more excited that it’s your eighth episode and we’re sitting here together.

Leanne: It feels quite momentous.

Leanne: And what many of you might not know is Paula’s in Ireland back home for this recording, so it’s extra special.

Leanne: So thank you so much.

Paula: It is, it’s fantastic.

Paula: So we’re sitting here in the offices of Chilli Pepper in Dublin.

Paula: And we’re gonna talk through some of the kind of projects that have been done over the last number of years.

Paula: But before we start that, as you know, we start every show with our favorite loyalty statistic.

Paula: So I’m going to ask Leanne to tell me, first and foremost, what is your favorite loyalty statistic?

Leanne: So Mayan, I kind of had a bit of a laugh going through this because I thought my team was so sick and tired of hearing all my loyalty statistics.

Leanne: But I chose one that I thought would be really interesting for your listeners.

Leanne: And that is that 77% of loyalty programs based purely on transactional behaviors, like earning points, et cetera, actually are said to fail within the first two years.

Leanne: And that was a stat that came out of Capgemini, which I found quite interesting.

Leanne: And then listening to your podcast with Crispin Rogers a couple of weeks ago, where he said, I think it was on episode six, if I’m not mistaken, he mentioned about the seven billion pounds worth of points and currencies that haven’t actually been used.

Leanne: And both of these fit neatly into our functional and kind of rational belief of loyalty in Chilli Pepper, which is that we believe participation is the holy grail of loyalty programs and loyalty success.

Leanne: And by that we mean that if you actually give customers the opportunity to engage both from a transactional and an emotional point of view, get them to participate in your program, that results in them being committed to your brand and into your program.

Leanne: And so what we tend to see is a lot of programs that are very focused on transactional, so don’t have any of the emotion, they’re not connected with the brand, they’re not authentic.

Leanne: Those programs tend to land up being just purely transactional programs, where they have huge balances of rewards or points and rewards that are not deemed, redeemed.

Leanne: And so looking at it now through the lens of consumers, we have to find ways to get them to authentically engage with our brands.

Leanne: And so transactional loyalty programs don’t work anymore.

Leanne: We have to look at balancing transactional and emotional.

Paula: Lovely, lovely.

Paula: That’s really succinct, Leanne.

Paula: And yeah, I really think we need to explore reinventing loyalty programs, because that’s something you and I have talked about.

Paula: And I know Chilli Pepper is doing a huge amount of work around.

Paula: Before we get into, you know, maybe the zeitgeist in the Irish loyalty market, I’d love to look back at some of the award-winning programs that you’ve worked on.

Paula: And I suppose the one that I’m always most excited about, purely because I’ve seen it, you know, internationally, is the Player Park program.

Paula: And I suppose listeners will be very familiar that I do a lot of work in fuel retail.

Paula: And the program that you developed in an industry that I think is absolutely renowned for, you know, tiny margins, grudge purchase, and really undifferentiated.

Paula: Like, I would love to just talk about what does that program do.

Paula: And for listeners, what I will just say is the program was originally built for a company called Topaz, which still is the leading fuel retailer in Ireland, but has been acquired by Circle K, which I’m going to say would be three or four years ago now, maybe even longer.

Paula: So Irish consumers are very familiar now with Circle K.

Paula: And Circle K clearly have brought their own expertise from around the world, but what they have done is retained Player Park.

Paula: So Leanne, tell us all about that amazing program.

Leanne: And you know, Player Park was a really, it was a catalyst in many people’s lives at the time, because Topaz, as you said, largest fuel and convenience brand in Ireland, loads of footfall, millions of transactions a week going through their tills, but margin on fuel is minute.

Leanne: And so when you looked at the fuel industry, and you know this well, and many of your listeners will too, it’s not like conventional retailing where you can change your margins up and down, and from a loyalty program perspective, afford maybe a little bit more than other industries.

Leanne: So when Topaz approached Chilli Pepper and asked us to look at customer loyalty, it wasn’t a free for all, yes, we’re going for a loyalty program.

Leanne: It was come in, investigate it, and convince us that this can actually help us get closer to our customers.

Leanne: This was not a, you’ve got a blank check, come in and create something.

Leanne: And I’ll never forget the gentleman who brought us in.

Leanne: We were standing in the canteen, and I just presented our pitch deck to him, and he turned around and said, Ah, sure, listen, give it a go.

Leanne: Three people before you have tried, and they’ve never been able to fix it.

Leanne: You know, to fix it, but what I mean by that is create something that worked, that means that the customers loved it, the business saw the value in it, and that they could actually see a return on.

Leanne: So this was a very tall order, and maybe to set the scene very quickly, it’s not just fuel and convenience for Tobes at the time, that they were the largest home heat distributor.

Paula: Got it.

Leanne: And that they also had the largest fuel card base, so it was B2B as well.

Leanne: So trying to find a solution that worked across their complex business in a way that consumers would engage with on your point of a grudge purchase and to make it stack up financially was no mean feat.

Paula: Of course.

Leanne: And so what we did is we went out to research, we started off discussing, having one-to-ones with their senior management team, discussing what the business objectives were.

Leanne: I wasn’t looking at loyalty to start with, I was going, how can I figure out how this business works and what are their business objectives and what are their business challenges?

Leanne: And we then brought their entire senior manager, the directors of Topaz at the time into a room and brainstormed with them and got a real essence of who they were as a business.

Leanne: And their premise at the time of the business was, that’s better, that was their kind of line, trying to do something, but always trying to do it just that much better.

Leanne: And so we created three different, what we call in Chilli Pepper loyalty wireframes, which were very different in their look and feel.

Leanne: And their approach and their mechanisms.

Leanne: And we took them into research with these customers.

Leanne: And the whole point of a loyalty wireframe is to actually get customers to say, I hate that, I’d never engage with it.

Leanne: Thank goodness we didn’t invest in that.

Leanne: Yeah.

Leanne: There’s a lot more, obviously, there’s more science behind it than that.

Leanne: But a lot of the times we say to our clients, if they say no to a concept, that’s brilliant because you haven’t invested it.

Leanne: Yeah.

Leanne: And invested in it.

Leanne: And so we took these three wireframes into research and two more traditional loyalty programs.

Leanne: And then one really crazy idea, which was all around gamification in a very simple format to begin with.

Leanne: And at the end of the day, three key insights came out.

Leanne: And the first one was very much that no loyalty really, and we call it traditional loyalty.

Leanne: No traditional loyalty really existed in the fuel industry.

Leanne: And by that, I mean, it sounds like quite a bold statement, but by that, I mean that convenience, so proximity to your petrol station and price of petrol are bigger drivers of course than the traditional loyalty programs.

Leanne: So you’re already in quite a tough market.

Leanne: And Paulie, you’d know a lot about this from your fuel background.

Leanne: The second thing was, fuel is a big grudge purchase, but it goes deeper than that.

Leanne: And this is what I found fascinating.

Leanne: Women hated filling up with fuel.

Leanne: They thought that their hands would stink afterwards, that their clothes would stink, and all these brands are trying to put plastic gloves and they’d fill it up, but it didn’t change the fact that many women in our research, and this was just of our segment of research, would actually get their husbands or boyfriends or dads to fill up their car because they hated it so much.

Leanne: And then for parents, filling up with petrol with their kids in the back of the car was quite a concern because what you did, you leave the kids in the car when you’re going to pay and what have you.

Leanne: So there were a lot of interesting insights that we were picking at through this loyalty wireframe research, where we were able to identify some loyalty triggers.

Leanne: So what were the things that we could do, just even if it was 1% better, what were the things that we could do from a loyalty perspective that would help shift this focus from consumers?

Leanne: And the third point to make is that Topaz was not first to market with a loyalty program in Ireland.

Leanne: And so they almost had to overcome the inherent or habitual behavior that their competitor brand had created around the understanding of loyalty in a fuel market.

Leanne: And the interesting insight that came out of all of this research and many, many weeks and weeks of work was that we had to give customers permission to play.

Leanne: Now, this is gonna sound like a big stretch for anybody who’s worked in loyalty and the fuel industry, but we had to just make filling up that little bit more fun.

Leanne: Now, that’s still gonna sound like a stretch to many people, but the dots just joined for us.

Leanne: And it was, you know, people don’t understand one sense or feel.

Leanne: They don’t, it doesn’t really mean anything to them.

Paula: It’s so little value.

Leanne: So little value.

Leanne: Coupled with the fact that we believe participation is the holy grail in loyalty, we understood that if you could give them the opportunity, that every time they filled up, they had the chance to win something significant.

Leanne: We were onto a good wicket.

Leanne: And so, Play or Park was created, the premise of which is very simple now that we look back at it.

Leanne: And beautiful in its simplicity is that when you fill up with fuel, you get a game in currency, a point, for, I think that we called it a token at the time.

Leanne: I think they might have kept that language now.

Leanne: You get a token for every liter of fuel that you put in the car, and you get four tokens for every euro that you spend in store.

Leanne: As a result of that, when you collect 200 tokens, that is equal to one play.

Leanne: And that play gives you the choice every single month to play your points or pay your tokens to win the chance of a lifetime or to park your points if that month’s experience of a lifetime isn’t what you’re looking for, to the next month.

Leanne: And the essence behind the experience of a lifetime, the monthly prize, was that it was always meant to be shared.

Leanne: So it would be a trip to New York for you and for friends, all expenses paid.

Leanne: It was meant to be shared.

Paula: Beautiful.

Leanne: A new word of mouth type thing.

Leanne: The second was that it was always meant to be a money can’t, a truly money can’t buy experience.

Leanne: So things like access to New York Fashion Week for you and your mates, if that was the case, or really innovative experiences.

Leanne: And the team at Topaz worked so hard to identify what these once in a lifetime experiences were for their customers, that actually when you looked at the 12 month calendar of experiences of a lifetime, the debates would start off, oh, I’m parking my points for December when it’s free fuel for a year, because for many people that was really important, whereas others were dying to go to New York Fashion Week, Paula, you’d be there.

Paula: Go together.

Leanne: Yes, so even the experiences of a lifetime were so well thought through based on insights and customer needs and motivations.

Leanne: And then to make matters even better, and I’m sure many of your listeners can understand this, that we see the same in National Lottery as well, is this winner’s belief.

Leanne: There is an inherent culture in Ireland specifically where people are quite cynical and they don’t believe that anybody wins the prizes.

Paula: That’s very true.

Paula: Very true.

Paula: I’ve seen that in research.

Paula: Yes.

Paula: Very true.

Leanne: So we’re very cognizant of this, and so winner’s belief became something that we held very close to our hearts when we were developing the strategy.

Paula: Love it.

Leanne: And so what we did to counterbalance this was, every time somebody, a consumer, played in a month, even if they didn’t win the beautiful experience of a lifetime to New York, they would win something.

Leanne: And that something would always be the same for everybody in that month.

Leanne: In other words, it would be a free cappuccino and a pastry or a free, if it was the healthy summer months, it would, you know, coming into the summer months, it would be water and, you know, a lovely fruit pot.

Leanne: And so what this meant is as consumers got engaged in the program, even if they didn’t win the big prize, they still got something that they could redeem after the fact.

Leanne: And look, the interesting part of Playa Park, which nobody really sees now, is that we built a business case, a very robust commercial business case that needed to get top level board approval as to the cost of running a program and to ensure that it was actually A, going to see a return, B, that it was not eating the margin like many other fuel loyalty programs were, and C, that customers would actually love it and engage in it.

Leanne: And the results were outstanding.

Leanne: It ended up being the first ever gamified, sorry, they say ongoing gamified retail loyalty program in the world.

Leanne: The reason was because it wasn’t just for a month or for two, it wasn’t a gimmick.

Leanne: This was actually their loyalty mechanic.

Leanne: And as a result, they gained incredible market share.

Leanne: 27% of Irish consumers would now choose Topaz to go to versus others.

Leanne: There’s loads of statistics from the business out there on the internet if you Google it, which I know you have for your articles, they’re amazing.

Leanne: The results have been outstanding.

Leanne: And the interesting thing is people still play.

Leanne: It hasn’t lost its impetus.

Paula: The fun factor.

Leanne: The fun factor.

Leanne: So it’s been a huge success.

Leanne: We’re proud of it because commercially it’s stacked up.

Paula: Yes, yeah.

Leanne: And the consumers got the energy and the excitement of it.

Leanne: And more importantly, now that they have rebranded to Circle K, that they have kept it, even though, yeah.

Leanne: And even though Circle K has a standard points-based program around the rest of the globe, they’ve decided to keep Playwell Park.

Leanne: So it’s wonderful for everybody.

Paula: There you go.

Paula: And I can share with you from my knowledge of fuel retail, that Circle K globally has a policy and they call it copy with pride.

Paula: So if there was anything underperforming with Playwell Park, they would be straight off to other markets to take their loyalty programs and bring it here.

Paula: But what you’ve done is you’ve tapped into an extraordinary insight that particularly, I am an Irish woman, I hate filling my car, I’m in your target segment.

Paula: They absolutely, and we absolutely got the difference between this brand is making this a bit of fun.

Paula: On my commute, which genuinely, I’m not going to enjoy.

Paula: So really, really, that is just, I think a career high for you and one that again, I’ve written about, I’ve celebrated.

Paula: And yeah, just one that I think there’s a lot of resources on your website, which we’ll come to later.

Paula: But the more that people are aware of these type of ideas.

Paula: And remind me, when did Playwell Park launch?

Leanne: So it launched in 2013.

Paula: Okay, so six years.

Leanne: Six years, yeah.

Leanne: Six years, yeah.

Leanne: And what I’d say to you is that there’s another part, it’s kind of like a trifecta in my idea, when I look back at Playwell Park is the team that they had working in Topaz at the time were so open to trying something new.

Leanne: And I used the word brave, not in a patronizing way at all, but when a crazy South African woman, accent, Greek surname, you know.

Paula: We don’t quite know where she came from.

Leanne: But doesn’t know, the chameleon that she is walks in based on sound, solid insights, great commercial, you know, forecasts and business case with a wacky idea.

Leanne: And they looked at it and they said, let’s do it.

Leanne: And they put the full force of the business behind it, including the finance teams, the buyers, the marketing team were outstanding, the operations, the B2B side of it, the fuel card teams.

Leanne: This was not a one man show.

Leanne: This was an entire organization stepping firmly into their belief that the customer should be at the center of it.

Leanne: And the reason why now, Paula, I look back at it and I believe it’s a career high is actually because it was the culmination of deep customer insight with a brilliant client and group of people that were so committed to the customer.

Leanne: And then obviously Chilli Pepper bringing our level of expertise and experience on top of it.

Leanne: And I think that is the power of three that made it so unique.

Leanne: That’s what I’m so proud of more than anything.

Paula: Great, great case study, Leanne.

Paula: So thank you for that.

Paula: There’s a million things I could pick up on in what you’ve said, but one I love particularly, and it was at the very beginning, and then I wanna go into kind of how you approach these things.

Paula: I always find it a challenge when a client says, convince us that we should do a loyalty program.

Paula: I mean, how do you respond to that?

Paula: Because at that stage, I think, in a discussion with either a CEO, be it your own CEO or a client, you don’t have the wow idea.

Paula: Do you know what I mean?

Paula: 100%.

Paula: So do you need or do you have the actual ROI at that stage to go, this is what I commit our business will deliver for you?

Paula: Or how do you answer that?

Leanne: Okay, so first of all, my job, it’s gonna sound completely counterintuitive, but my job is not to convince you that you need a loyalty program, okay?

Leanne: So I can bring resources and statistics and case studies of great work across multiple industries that can prove the power of loyalty, that can prove the power of data, that can prove the power of insights, and that can prove the return on a successfully implemented customer strategy.

Leanne: And I use customer strategy because it might not necessarily be a loyalty program that they need.

Leanne: It might be a customer engagement program or strategy that they need.

Leanne: And I’m picking on words there, but just to give you an insight into the way that I view it.

Leanne: So my philosophy is that businesses either place customers first or they don’t.

Leanne: That’s the first thing.

Leanne: If you don’t place the customer first, and you need somebody to convince you to, there are many agencies, many consulting firms that are out there that can do that.

Leanne: It’s not because I shy away from the discussion.

Leanne: I’m happy to have it.

Leanne: But I believe that the number one reason why customer strategies and loyalty programs work is because there’s commitment and buy-in from a very senior level that the customer is in some shape or form important in their business, right?

Paula: Talk about stating the obvious.

Paula: We see both.

Leanne: You hear where I’m coming from, right?

Leanne: So the second part of it is that from a loyalty program point of view, quite often I find when I speak to CEOs and CMOs, that they either have an idea of a loyalty solution that they’re looking for, or they are asking me why they should have a loyalty solution.

Leanne: And so what we tend to do is take all the information that they’ve given us, but then step back and have a broader business conversation with them.

Leanne: Because I would rather know whether you’re looking to increase margin, drive new market share, drive basket size from existing.

Leanne: I’d rather have those objectives, and then decide what type of customer solution you’re looking for, a customer strategy you’re looking for.

Leanne: When we then get into the loyalty discussion on your question specifically, is really when you look at somebody saying to you, what is the ROI going to be?

Leanne: I’m sure you spoke to the great experts that you’re speaking to on these episodes that have many different answers.

Leanne: There are loyalty stats coming out of their ears.

Leanne: That’s absolutely fine.

Leanne: But I believe it’s absolutely down to that specific customer.

Leanne: So I’m going to give an example.

Leanne: We had somebody approach us a couple of months ago and say, we’re looking for a loyalty program.

Leanne: Our board don’t believe in loyalty.

Leanne: You need to come in and convince them.

Leanne: I went because I’m in for a challenge, but I didn’t go in with it.

Leanne: I’m going to convince your board they need a loyalty program.

Leanne: I’m going to go in and show you how, if you are committed to a customer, if you show your empathy to customers, if you believe passionately about your business and connect with those customers, then there is an opportunity for you to drive engagement and commitment from those customers.

Leanne: And whether that’s a points-based program or a rewards program or a game of five laws program, whatever the case may be, will be determined based on what your customers say it is, not what you say it is.

Paula: Okay, lovely.

Leanne: And part of that journey is listening to customers and then building the optimum solution because there’s never going to be a one size fits all and then coming out with the business case.

Leanne: So there is no, look, in my opinion, there’s no ways that anybody can stand up in front of a business that they’ve just met and say, your ROI on a program is going to be X.

Leanne: Not in my experience.

Paula: Well, thank you.

Paula: I’m glad to hear that because I’m often sitting there going, I don’t have a crystal ball.

Paula: I can tell you a well-run program will change behavior.

Paula: But honestly, at that early stage, I just kind of feel the expectations can be, you know, in excess of what I want to put my name to until I get into how committed are you, how well are you going to operationalize and execute on this program.

Paula: And just to touch back on Topaz one more time, what as a consumer, I always felt was the, the engagement with staff was exceptional.

Paula: So with the best will in the world, your beautiful communication strategy and, you know, proposition is utterly useless unless at that, you know, moment of truth, the staff member actually enthusiastically and with, let’s say, authenticity can say, no, this is a great program you should join.

Leanne: I think so, Paul.

Leanne: And I think what tends to happen on your point of trying to answer that question very early on in your engagement, if there are any other loyalty consultants out there or there we are, people who are working, listeners who are working in a brand where they’re the loyalty manager trying to convince their business why loyalty matters.

Paula: Exactly.

Leanne: And why it’s successful, why it should be successful and could be successful is we often get calls from brands that are looking to implement loyalty programs.

Leanne: And quite often they will say, we have found a loyalty technology partner who can help us develop the technology or help us implement the technology.

Paula: Gotcha.

Leanne: And we need you to come in and find a strategy for us.

Paula: Yeah.

Leanne: Or we’d get a call to say, we have appointed a loyalty rewards partners.

Leanne: We figured out what all of the rewards are, but now we need you to come in and help us figure out what the plan is.

Leanne: And we at Chilli Pepper fundamentally believe strategy first.

Paula: Great.

Leanne: So we say to them, and we’re great at sharing knowledge.

Leanne: And as I always say to you, Paula, go on the website.

Leanne: There’s loads of information for free.

Leanne: We’re absolute advocates in sharing information.

Leanne: And I’d say the same to them too.

Leanne: I’d say, great, go and have a look on the website.

Leanne: There’s loads of information, but realistically, brand should start strategy first.

Leanne: Because what tends to happen is if you have a technology platform, and now you’re trying to find a solution to fit into it, you’re bound by what the technology company can or can’t do.

Leanne: Whereas if you go and figure out what your strategy is, what your customers want, what the insights are, what the loyalty triggers are, what the reward triggers are, what behaviors you want to change, put it all in to a brilliant strategy supported by a rock-solid business case, and then go to the technology company and say, this is what we want to do.

Leanne: They will tell you how they can make it happen.

Leanne: And so the technology, we always say the strategy stretches the thinking.

Leanne: The technology shouldn’t withhold the thinking.

Paula: Okay, contain it.

Leanne: Contain the thinking.

Paula: Anyway, got it.

Leanne: And the same for rewards partners.

Leanne: Go to your reward partners, get them involved, but just don’t go to them first, in our opinion, but we would say that because we’re strategists.

Leanne: So of course we’re going to say that, but bring them on the journey because they’re the experts in reward, but rather do strategy first and then bring it into reward thinking.

Paula: Okay, fantastic.

Paula: So thank you for that.

Paula: And again, I think it’s the gods of Google that we can partly blame.

Paula: So, I think lots of people do sit down and go, loyalty program, and there’s just much more technology options or rewards options.

Paula: And they don’t always think actually, strategic thinking probably needs some expertise.

Paula: And again, I know a part that you’re amazing on, you’ve already talked about it, is that business case piece.

Paula: So, we’ve got an idea.

Paula: Well, can we afford to execute on that idea?

Paula: How generous do we want to be?

Paula: And whatever, yeah.

Leanne: And I should just say on that, I love our technology partners that we use.

Paula: Of course.

Leanne: They’re experts.

Paula: Oh, always.

Leanne: We could not do anything that we do without them at all.

Leanne: You’re the same.

Paula: Yeah.

Leanne: And quite often I’m writing strategy and phoning our technology partners saying, is this possible?

Leanne: And they go, oh, heaven’s above Leanne, really.

Leanne: But collectively, it’s improved all of our businesses when you work as partnerships.

Paula: I was going to say, most of the technology companies I’ve worked with, they heave a sigh of relief when they go, oh, thank God that the plan is signed off.

Paula: This is not going to be a movable feast in terms of a client literally making it up as they go along, with the best will in the world.

Paula: And I was referring earlier, I suppose, to a former life where I was a beauty therapist.

Paula: And I know this is completely off topic, but I always had the same opinion in terms of beauty therapy, because I specialize in doing nail extensions.

Paula: Again, very random.

Paula: But people used to say to me, oh, you’ve got so many competitors.

Paula: I was like, I don’t mind what competitor you go to, but go to somebody who is specialized in doing this.

Paula: And it’s the same principle for loyalty.

Paula: Find somebody who knows what you need, can help you on your journey, educate you, make sure you’ve got the right technology partner.

Paula: Because again, from talking with Mike Atkin, as you know, we’ve benchmarked 65 loyalty platforms.

Paula: Like, where are you gonna start looking, if you have a great idea to find the right platform, unless you’ve got a crystal clear plan, and then at least go, okay, who can do this?

Leanne: And it’s true, though, Porter, because it is the power of the collective.

Leanne: So, you know, you could write a great strategy, or let me do it the other way.

Leanne: You could have great technology without the right strategy, and the program won’t be as successful as it could be.

Leanne: You could have great technology, great strategy, and the rewards are wrong.

Leanne: Customers are not gonna engage, participation is gonna go down, you’re gonna see a knock on.

Leanne: You might have all of that that’s great, and the research, it’s not based on sound, or maybe there’s no research.

Leanne: Quite often, there isn’t research.

Leanne: So we build kind of a proprietary strategic framework, which I’ll share with your listeners later, if you’d like that.

Leanne: Which touches every single kind of part of that kind of understanding of who the customer is, what technology, what are they looking for?

Leanne: Is it an app?

Leanne: Isn’t it an app?

Leanne: What rewards are they looking for?

Leanne: Which just means that Chilli Pepper are absolutely not saying we’re experts in technology, we’re not, but we find the right people for the right client to come in and solve their problem for them.

Leanne: And so that’s why we work in a brilliant industry that we do, where we have honor and respect for many of our colleagues and our peers to come on the journey with us and help us make it the best that it can be.

Paula: Absolutely.

Paula: And I would love to talk about that now, Leanne, because what you gave me in preparation for this conversation was, I suppose, what you believe are the principles for success with loyalty and driving that with customers.

Paula: And we’ve already talked about the emotional piece, as distinct from transactional piece, but maybe just give us a high-level view of what are the key principles of, you know, creating successful loyalty with your customers?

Leanne: Oh, so fascinating.

Leanne: What Paula knows is that I could be here for eight hours, actually.

Leanne: Okay, so I’ll do a whistle stop tour.

Leanne: And what I say to you is there are brilliant courses and diplomas that you can do in loyalty across the world, and you’re an advocate of them, and that’s amazing, and so am I.

Leanne: And we’ve listened to Mike and all of his experience in creating them.

Leanne: This is really the foundation that I kind of take my team of consultants through when we’re writing loyalty strategies, because it helps us to actually ensure that we’re sticking to our own principles of loyalty, okay?

Leanne: So the first one is really that it links with the brand positioning and the ethos of the brand.

Leanne: So what do I mean by this?

Leanne: If your listeners haven’t heard about glass box brands, I’d really recommend they go and Google it.

Leanne: It’s a brilliant kind of description of brands that need to become more authentic, and that consumers want to know what you’re doing internally.

Leanne: They want to understand what your brand and your ethos are, and they only want to work with businesses or only want to deal with businesses who are authentic and doing the right things.

Leanne: And now with all the environmental issues, we see a lot more of this coming about.

Leanne: So what often happens with brands is that they would be approached by a kind of a white label loyalty program that will come in and they’ll say, look, we can give you all of this on a technology loyalty platform or a loyalty technology platform, and we can just tailor it to you.

Leanne: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that.

Leanne: I’m just saying make sure you actually tailor it to match your brand ethos and your values.

Leanne: Otherwise, to any consumer out there, they will just see it as a cheap example of a loyalty program that has just been plugged into the side of your business.

Leanne: And instead of the business being a customer-centric organization that is driven by true customer understanding, it looks like you’ve gone, oh, heaven’s above, we’ve forgotten to do a loyalty program and plugged it on the side.

Leanne: Consumers can spot a fake loyalty program from a million miles away.

Leanne: So being authentic to your brand is keen.

Paula: Yeah, and I think that’s probably the first lesson I learned from you.

Paula: And I just want to go back to, because we worked on O2 Priority Moments together, and it was 10 years ago.

Paula: And at the time, I mean, Telefónica is an extraordinary company.

Paula: It has that customer advocacy and intention.

Paula: But again, the reason you were brought in to think about strategy, and I was brought in to help and operationalize and everything else, was around that point of differentiation.

Paula: They’d had the white label solution.

Paula: They’d seen that that wasn’t fooling anyone.

Paula: So they were like, no, we want something where people actually go, no, that’s cool.

Leanne: And that’s so true.

Leanne: And it’s so true, that’s cool, and that’s relevant to the relationship that I have with the brand.

Leanne: So I can understand that O2 is a trendy brand.

Leanne: I can understand that it’s all about mobile and movement and technology.

Leanne: So everything that you created as a result of that went through the lens of authenticity from the brand that O2 was at the time.

Leanne: And I think it’s really, really important.

Leanne: And I think the second point that we always make is that it taps into a unique insight.

Leanne: So, and the Topaz example that I gave you, that’s absolutely fine.

Leanne: That’s one example.

Leanne: A great example of taps into a unique insight is that I believe, now insights are very difficult to come up with.

Leanne: And there are many, many, many research experts out there who spend their days and nights crunching numbers to come up with insights.

Leanne: But turning kind of an insight into a real customer insight that you can build a brilliant strategy on, it’s such a unique skill.

Leanne: And I would say to any companies out there, spend money on turning research into proper deep insights.

Leanne: Because what you unlock from there is something that you can use to create an absolutely unique program.

Leanne: And many of the loyalty programs that we create, we spend more time actually working on the insights at the very, kind of at that research stage of the project, than we do actually doing the research, if you know what I mean.

Leanne: So once it all comes out, we spend that time.

Leanne: Because a brilliant insight is one of those things where a consumer sees it, like you did with Playa Park, and you go, wow.

Paula: Yeah, love it.

Leanne: How come nobody’s thought of that before?

Leanne: I love it.

Leanne: So insights are really, really key.

Leanne: I think that’s important.

Leanne: And then I think we mentioned participation engagement, that’s really, from our point of view, something that we are big on.

Leanne: And then the other side of it is really the kind of the rewards.

Leanne: And I think, you know, it’s quite often an area where brands are only now realizing the importance of having the right rewards.

Paula: Correct.

Leanne: And making sure that they’re balanced across tangible, experiential, emotional, and again, from your podcast a couple of weeks ago, you know, the emotional side of rewards are becoming so important.

Leanne: And, you know, any of our clients that you speak to, my team would tell you the same.

Leanne: I’m constantly on the what I earn burn ratio, how many rewards have been redeemed, where are we, what are customers saying about them.

Leanne: Once the program is up and running, I’m more interested in making sure that customers actually get those rewards and they get that experience of something so fabulous that they wouldn’t have had before.

Leanne: Because that is where somebody goes, oh, I value this.

Leanne: Yes.

Paula: Yeah.

Leanne: It’s worthwhile.

Paula: Yeah, and a couple of things I want to mention.

Paula: One, there’s a fabulous statistic on the 7-Eleven franchise website, which I think every loyalty professional should understand and you would have known it in your topaz days, but it’s literally after the customer redeems the first time, their basket spend goes up 33%.

Paula: So by closing the loop and making sure they get the experience and that can be anything from an emotional reward or a micro reward, honestly, the change in behavior is exceptional.

Paula: So I really love that.

Leanne: Very important, Paula.

Leanne: And I think that links in really nicely to the metric side.

Leanne: And I know in one of the other podcasts, you were talking about data and the lack of kind of, how can I put it, attention that some brands give to this mountain of data.

Leanne: And it’s so overwhelming because they all of a sudden go from zero to hero with all this data.

Leanne: And they’re kind of standing back going, what do we do?

Leanne: And I think we work on a loyalty scorecard, if you can imagine that, for brands that are starting out with their loyalty programs.

Leanne: We would say to them, look, for the first month or two, have your scorecard up.

Leanne: We normally get them to blow it up and put it onto their office wall so everybody can see it to go, the scorecard, these are the 10, or these are the 15 KPIs, the metrics for success for the first couple of months, just before you get all that data.

Leanne: Because if they try and dive into the data too quickly, they tend to be overwhelmed by it.

Paula: So, you understand what I mean.

Leanne: And I mean, many of your listeners might be laughing, saying, you know, this sounds crazy.

Leanne: It all should be magic and perfect.

Leanne: The reality is the scale of loyalty programs that we implement across many global brands is that you have to have everybody connected, the influencers going around, understanding it, matrix management, stakeholders, you know, CEOs, down to the data guys and girls who are sitting there trying to make sense of data that they’ve never seen before.

Leanne: So, you know, it’s all planned out beautifully.

Leanne: It all goes to plan.

Leanne: But it’s also being very kind to yourselves as business, knowing what you expect to achieve at specific kind of milestones throughout your journey of loyalty.

Leanne: And now we’re at a stage in Ireland, which is very interesting.

Leanne: And I’m sure across the world, we’re actually going to a conference in a couple of days that had this topic, which is why I’m actually going, because I thought, okay, this is very interesting, which is around the reinvention, or we call it redefining loyalty, but it’s the reinvention of loyalty programs, the programs that have been around for years and have done well.

Leanne: Or maybe some others haven’t, or maybe others have done exceptionally well.

Leanne: And how we all as loyalty marketeers need to stand up now and say, okay, let’s look at this completely objectively and identify how we can actually make it better and make them better.

Paula: Okay, so redefining loyalty, that’s the focus.

Leanne: It’s the focus for Chilli Pepper and for a lot of our clients too.

Paula: Wonderful.

Paula: The next big topic, and I’m aware obviously of there’s so much we can talk about, but measurement, I know, you’ve already just touched on it there in terms of KPIs.

Paula: And there are so many brands out there that do their NPS scores, but I think you have a real, I think a much more advanced view of what NPS can be.

Paula: So I’d love you to talk all of the listeners through, you know, all of your understanding of NPS.

Paula: You know, first of all, is it being used in your experience, in your clients, in the Irish market?

Paula: And how is it evolving?

Paula: Because I know you taught me some new acronyms as we chatted before the call.

Paula: So it’s like I’ve already learned something from you again, Leanne.

Paula: So talk to us about NPS and, you know, what does success look like in terms of your Net Promoter Score?

Leanne: Such a great question.

Leanne: So NPS has, as everybody would know, has been hailed as the answer to all metrics.

Leanne: And especially in loyalty, we hold it in such high esteem and rightly so.

Leanne: But there was always a part of NPS that I couldn’t quite figure out.

Leanne: I’m burying my soul now.

Leanne: Anyway, there was always a part of NPS that I couldn’t figure out because I’d be looking at all this data and all these metrics.

Leanne: And the one thing that I couldn’t figure out ever was how, you know, the NPS score could be measured against both the loyalty program and the brand.

Leanne: For me, it was perfect in its high level, looking at it.

Leanne: But to actually get into the difference between the relationship, which to me is the heart and the, you know, that feeling about a brand versus the, they’ve delivered my airline tickets into my inbox and I’m going on a flight or whatever the case may be, just always was a question.

Leanne: And so in research that Chilli Pepper have been doing for years, since we started, we had come up with this thing called the loyalty triggers, which was very much looking at how, asking yourself the question in the research and asking your customers the questions, what would drive emotional loyalty?

Leanne: What would drive transactional loyalty?

Leanne: And in retail, it would very much be, scan my card, get the points, get money off.

Leanne: That was very transactional.

Leanne: And so we had created this loyalty triggers piece and that was our way of interpreting and understanding the difference between emotional loyalty and transactional loyalty.

Leanne: Then subsequently, the very clever people in the world, obviously having the same challenge as we were way more mature in their markets, developed what they now look at as RNPS.

Leanne: I’m gonna say R, because my accent, R for Rory.

Leanne: RNPS and TNPS.

Leanne: And this is quite interesting.

Leanne: So the RNPS stands for relational.

Leanne: I termed it relationship.

Leanne: It’s not accurate, so if anybody’s talking about it, I call it relationship, because people tend to grasp it quicker.

Leanne: And so what this is about is when you’re going and running an NPS score, you test it in two ways.

Leanne: You test it from a relational point of view.

Leanne: So what’s the overall perception of my business?

Leanne: What’s the overall perception of the brand?

Leanne: How do you feel about being a customer of X brand?

Leanne: What are the relationship building kind of things that you can test from a brand point of view that will help you get an idea as to how a customer actually feels about your brand?

Leanne: But it tends to be done in a broader framework.

Leanne: So it’s almost like a brand health check, a loyalty program health check, whatever you decide.

Leanne: So instead of doing a brand, you might say, how do you feel about the Aralingus loyalty program?

Leanne: How do you feel about the Aralingus, the fact that Aralingus has a loyalty program?

Leanne: It’s kind of all more relationship type work, type research.

Leanne: Then you look at the transactional part, which is all about the physical last interaction or transaction that you did.

Leanne: So you land back in Dubai in a couple of days time, Emirates sends you an email to say, how was your flight?

Leanne: And there’s a whole lot of questions in there, obviously a number of them being around TNPS.

Leanne: What is fascinating about this to me and gets me so excited is when we work with brands on RNPS and TNPS, we see brands that excel in RNPS and their TNPS is on the floor.

Leanne: And what that means is they’ve done a fantastic job building relationships.

Leanne: Their brand is pretty much A for a way, but the physical ability to be able to do business with them is flawed.

Paula: Yes.

Leanne: It’s flawed.

Paula: How frustrating.

Leanne: And how frustrating.

Leanne: And you know that that is only on a, there’s a timeline in which consumers will, or customers will engage with that level of crazy, and then they will drop off and switch.

Leanne: And then at the same time, you could have customer brands that are brilliant at TNPS.

Leanne: They’re slick, they’ve got great customer experiences and journeys, and they’ve mapped them all out and they fix all the flaws.

Leanne: But from a brand reputation point of view, or from a me wanting to be associated with you, or me believing that you’re doing the right thing, doesn’t feel so good.

Leanne: So from a business perspective, they have to focus then on the RNPS side to bring that up.

Leanne: So in my opinion, it’s absolutely the next way for any business, any marketeer, any loyalty marketeer, I’d be looking at this because we work with a really fantastic insurance company, and they are very progressive in this realm, and it’s actually one of their global directives is to increase their NPS score.

Paula: Wonderful.

Leanne: And so when you start to see relationship marketing, customer loyalty, whatever you want to term it, whatever the description is in your business, being pushed onto the board agenda, that a key metric like our NPS becomes a deciding factor for bonuses and for success, you really know you’re in the territory with like-minded people that you want to work with.

Paula: Amazing, amazing.

Paula: And I’m gonna start talking to you now about resources, Leanne, but even before that, there is one I wanna add in, not quite on that depth of expertise, but the first time I started looking at NPS, there’s a great article, I’ll put it in the show notes, and it’s Harvard Business Review, and they call it the one number you need to grow.

Paula: So if there are any listeners who haven’t even started at overall Net Promoter Score, it talks through exactly why that’s the one number you need to grow.

Paula: And I think you’ve touched on it there, for example, with, you might fly Aer Lingus because it’s the only airline going to Dubai or wherever, but actually, does that mean I want to refer it to my friends?

Paula: Well, maybe not, because actually it mightn’t have been a good experience.

Paula: So to understand that distinction between the two, I think is a phenomenal evolution of the whole thinking.

Paula: So I really want to thank you for that.

Paula: And then just overall resources, Leanne, like how do you get all of your knowledge?

Paula: I mean, we’ve talked about it, it’s two decades, you know, my God, who wants to think about working for that length of time?

Paula: As you mentioned, we’re both going to the loyalty surgery this week, so we’ll be reporting back from that one.

Paula: And definitely from my side, you know, making sure that we’re all up to date in terms of the latest thinking.

Paula: But where do you go to stay up to date, Leanne?

Paula: How do you learn?

Leanne: So we all have to look at the wise marketeer and all of those really good resources that are out there, but my passion is actually customer insights, which lead to loyalty solutions.

Leanne: So the kind of the places that I go to are J.

Leanne: Walter Thomas Intelligence, I don’t know if you get there.

Leanne: They are absolutely brilliant.

Leanne: They send out a weekly email.

Leanne: There’s loads of information on their website, but a weekly email that they send out, which is just thinking, global thinking.

Leanne: They’ve just done one on the anxiety index.

Paula: Oh my God.

Leanne: Looking at anxiety and consumer behaviors.

Leanne: So it is not loyalty specific, but it gives you a really good insight into consumer behavior.

Leanne: The other one is Forrester.

Leanne: We all love Forrester.

Leanne: It’s absolutely fantastic in Loyalty One.

Leanne: But my other favorite and the place I go to, especially when I’m building writing strategies for clients is trendwatching.com, because they’re very good again at deciphering what’s going on and putting it into information that you can actually use.

Leanne: And this is what I was talking about at the beginning of the show, which is we can do all this research, but if we can’t translate it into insights, it’s not valuable to any of us.

Leanne: And so it’s how we actually do that.

Leanne: I remember actually on that point, one of the best insights that we had on a B2B loyalty program, which was for Dulux, so AXA Noble Global, has a portion of their company is called Dulux, and it was a B2B loyalty program for the trade decorators in Ireland.

Leanne: And the interesting insight that we unearthed there is that they didn’t see themselves as business people.

Paula: Interesting.

Paula: Oh my goodness.

Leanne: They flipped left and right as I’m a trade decorator, which is a business person in inverted commas, but I don’t see myself as that.

Leanne: And then to I’m an everyday consumer.

Leanne: So every time they shopped, they’re engaged with any brand, including Dulux for their trade, they purchased as if they were consumers.

Paula: Interesting.

Leanne: And so when we created the loyalty strategy for Dulux Trade Points, or the loyalty strategy called Dulux Trade Points for Dulux, we led the entire development of the loyalty strategy through the fact that these guys saw themselves as consumers, and yet they were business people.

Leanne: And as a result of that, Dulux has now identified a cohort of trade customers that nobody else in Ireland has ever been able to communicate directly with.

Leanne: And we communicate in both a consumer and a business way so that they never feel overwhelmed by the communication they receive from a big brand like Dulux.

Paula: Okay, Leanne, I really wanted to talk through one particular, I suppose, moment in time.

Paula: And I think a lot of listeners would be at a point regularly where they would kind of go, okay, now I’m starting maybe in a new job.

Paula: I want to build a new loyalty program.

Paula: And I think there are a lot of people listening who are curious about what is the correct strategic approach to building a loyalty program?

Paula: So with that kind of mindset and need in mind, how would you recommend they go about that?

Leanne: Such a great question, Paul.

Leanne: And I think it’s often where people get overwhelmed because they don’t know where to start.

Leanne: So I can share what I believe the best strategic process is.

Leanne: I’m sure there’s other experts there who have got other pieces to add.

Paula: Yes.

Leanne: But I’ll share what’s worked very well for us and our clients over the years.

Leanne: And that is the six point kind of strategic approach that we take to loyalty.

Leanne: And anybody can do this.

Leanne: And Paula will tell you all.

Leanne: We’re very generous with everything that we share.

Leanne: But the first step that we always take is finding out from the senior management, the directors, as I mentioned to you earlier, what their objectives are, what their challenges are in the business.

Leanne: It’s very important that you understand the background of the business.

Leanne: Then what we tend to do is get into the absolute detail around what their loyalty expectations are.

Leanne: And what that does is it unpacks a lot of questions.

Leanne: You find out who the naysayers are.

Leanne: You find out who your supporters are.

Leanne: And it’s very important to be able to do that.

Leanne: And anybody who’s read change management books will understand how important it is to face that demon very early.

Leanne: And I mean, the situation, not the person.

Leanne: Face that very early, because it gives you a very clear idea of what the expectations are of the organization.

Leanne: And even if you’re a loyalty manager, be brave enough to go in and ask for a meeting with key players in finance and what have you, and genuinely see how interested they are.

Leanne: Getting their commitments and buy-in from the very beginning will stand you instead going through your loyalty strategy process and the development that comes with it.

Leanne: The second thing that we tend to do is we tend to run a loyalty innovation workshop.

Paula: Love it.

Leanne: And we bring as many people that are going to be involved in the project long-term into that room.

Leanne: And bearing in mind, as you alluded to earlier, many of the organizations that we’re going into, they’re saying to us, can you run a strategic review on a process, a loyalty process for us?

Leanne: We don’t know if we want a loyalty program or not, or we don’t know if we can afford a loyalty program or not.

Leanne: So we have no, we love clients coming to us and say, help us go through the motions of figuring out which one would work for us or whether we need it.

Leanne: I like that side of it because I feel that that’s an informed decision that they’re taking.

Leanne: And I must say to some of your listeners that might think this is quite strange, in many instances, we would turn around and say, your organ, at the end of the process, your organization wouldn’t suit a loyalty strategy.

Leanne: They would rather suit this type of an approach.

Leanne: So that is quite an interesting place to kind of get to.

Leanne: The workshop is all about getting their entire team on the same page with loyalty terminology.

Leanne: The understanding exactly what loyalty will and won’t do.

Leanne: Because what we’ve found is that the little Chinese walls and Chinese whispers that goes around are often the things that derail big change management programs or loyalty strategies that we create.

Leanne: So getting everybody on the same page, giving them that one or two day opportunity to share their views is really good.

Leanne: And in that loyalty innovation workshop, we get them to build what they think the optimum loyalty strategy is.

Leanne: And it’s very good because you start to see what they think customers would want.

Leanne: And so we take all of that information and it goes into our third step, which is our loyalty wireframe development.

Leanne: And as I mentioned to you earlier, it tests loyalty triggers.

Leanne: It’s about them saying no as much as it is about saying yes.

Leanne: But the best part of it is, majority of the ideas that come up in a boardroom or they come up from the team, there’s an element of it that’s there.

Leanne: But realistically, the customer might say yes or no, and we take that piece of information along with everything else.

Leanne: And exactly, as we mentioned, dig into the insights to try and find something that’s completely unique.

Leanne: For anybody that works in an organization that has a lot of research, start there.

Leanne: Start there.

Leanne: Go and have a look at all the research that’s already been done, because your chances are you’ll find a lot of interesting answers there as well.

Leanne: So use that.

Leanne: Don’t ever let anything that’s been done before go to waste.

Paula: Yeah.

Leanne: And the fourth step then is really the optimum loyalty strategy.

Leanne: Which is building the optimum mechanic.

Leanne: Yes.

Leanne: The thing that they’re gonna engage with.

Leanne: Okay.

Leanne: And that can be any, any level of mechanic that you want it to be, okay.

Leanne: As long as it’s, as we mentioned earlier, true to your brand, in line with what the business expectations are.

Leanne: Yeah.

Leanne: And then the last step is to build that business case.

Leanne: That everybody should be really, you know, looking at as whether the loyalty strategy and mechanic would be a success or not.

Leanne: Okay, okay.

Leanne: And we are dogged about our business cases.

Paula: Yes.

Leanne: Dogged about it.

Leanne: And that’s why we have so many financial directors and CFOs, part of our loyalty implementation pieces, because we bring it to them to have a look at.

Leanne: So the difference is that by the end of the loyalty strategy, we know that we have a strategy that would work, and we have a strategy that we know customers will engage with, but it’s making sure that the business understands the implication and the investment, both fixed and variable costs that are gonna be required to actually launch it.

Leanne: And then the final step is we go and find brilliant people like yourselves to help us with the implementation of the rewards side or the technology.

Leanne: And then quite often our clients keep us on to manage those programs right out to the end, like many other clients we work with, where we run their programs.

Leanne: And you’re constantly testing and learning and testing and learning.

Leanne: So that’s from a consulting point of view, but really anybody who’s working within an organization, I would say copy and paste those exact steps in whatever shape or form.

Leanne: And I think you’ll come out with a really robust sound strategy to work with.

Paula: That sounds amazing.

Paula: Fantastic.

Paula: So Leanne, I want to first of all, again, just acknowledge the incredible work.

Paula: I know when you came to the Irish market and set up Chilli Pepper 15 years ago, it was the only loyalty marketing strategy agency in the country.

Paula: And what blows my mind is it still is.

Paula: So it’s incredible to work with you and follow your journey.

Paula: And I do wanna make sure that people have an opportunity to connect with you.

Paula: So first of all, is there anything that we haven’t covered off that you’d like to kind of mention as we close?

Leanne: There’s so much, Paula.

Leanne: There really is so much.

Leanne: And I think what’s been beautiful from Chilli Pepper’s point of view is we’ve watched Ireland on its journey, but we also keep an eye on everything that’s going on across the globe, as well as many of your audience.

Leanne: I’m sure they do too.

Leanne: But what’s different to Chilli Pepper is we capture a lot of it and we put it up onto our website, ChilliPepper.ie, and we share that information because we’re firm believers in sharing as much as we possibly can.

Leanne: So anybody who wants to get access to that, it’s free, knock yourselves out, go online, and hopefully you get some inspiration from it.

Paula: Wonderful.

Paula: So what I am going to do is obviously make sure the show notes have Chilli Pepper’s website.

Paula: And again, because Leanne Papaioannou is not something everybody might know how to spell, I’m going to also make sure that we’ve got links directly to your LinkedIn profile, if that’s okay.

Paula: And just remains for me to say from my side, thank you for joining Let’s Talk Loyalty.

Paula: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty.

Paula: If you’d like me to send you the latest show each week, simply sign up for the show newsletter on letstalkloyalty.com, and I’ll send you the latest episode to your inbox every Thursday.

Paula: Or just head to your favorite podcast platform.

Paula: Find Let’s Talk Loyalty and subscribe.

Paula: Of course, I’d love your feedback and reviews, and thanks again for supporting the show.

Publisher’s Note:

This transcript was generated with the help of AI and podcast publishing tools such as Apple Podcast’s transcription service.

In the interests of efficiency and minimising our costs as a small business, it has not been checked by a human.

If you have any comments or concerns about the accuracy of this content, please do contact us for changes or corrections.