How e& Turned Smiles into a Digital Lifestyle Ecosystem (#772)

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

PAULA: 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.

PAULA: Today’s episode is hosted by Lisa Brightwell, who founded and leads Bright Insights Consulting, a consulting firm based in the UAE.

PAULA: With over 20 years’ experience in the region, Lisa specializes in crafting innovative loyalty strategies that harness customer intelligence to drive engagement, differentiation and long-term growth.

PAULA: Enjoy.

LISA: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV.

LISA: Today’s episode is about rewriting the rules of loyalty.

LISA: For years, particularly in Telco, loyalty programs have followed a familiar script, earn points, redeem rewards, drive retention, functional, transactional and predictable.

LISA: But what happens when you stop thinking of loyalty as a cost line on the P&L, and you start thinking of it as a product?

LISA: SMILES is arguably the largest loyalty program in the UAE, and has gone through exactly that transformation.

LISA: Once the program for E&, it has evolved into something much bigger, an open commercialized lifestyle ecosystem that welcomes customers from any telco.

LISA: And that wasn’t a small shift.

LISA: It challenged internal thinking, it challenged legacy assumptions, and it redefined what loyalty could mean inside a telco business.

LISA: Today, we’re going to unpack that journey from resistance to rule breaking, from rewards to everyday relevance, and from cost center to revenue engine.

LISA: I’m delighted today to welcome Antonio Ricciardi, the Senior Vice President Consumer Intelligence and Engagement at E&.

LISA: Hi, Antonio.

LISA: Welcome back to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV.

LISA: I know this is your second time around with us.

LISA: Thank you for coming back.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Pleasure.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It’s nice to have this new experience, more multi-sensorial this time.

LISA: Yeah, I like it.

LISA: I said to you earlier, I much prefer it when we’re in front of each other.

LISA: So it’s great to have you here.

LISA: And so, as you know, the first question we always ask our invitees is, can you tell me about a book that has potentially influenced your life, your career that has made an impact on you?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Yeah, I mean, I really love reading in general.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: There is this book called The Mamba Mentality.

LISA: The Mamba?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Mamba Mentality.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Have you heard about it?

LISA: As in Mamba, as in your mother, Mamba?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: No, it’s like M-A-M-B-A.

LISA: Oh, okay.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So this is the nickname of one former basketball player called Copy Bryant.

LISA: Oh, yes.

LISA: Okay.

LISA: Great basketball player.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Great basketball player, yes.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And I’ve never been into basket.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It’s not really my thing.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: As we were chatting earlier on, I’m interested in another type of sports.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But this book talks about, describes the mentality and the mindset of this person, Copy Bryant, in his quest to be the best he could possibly be at what really matters for him, matters for him.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: In his case, it was, you know, becoming a great basketball player, fantastic father, and later on, you know, an Oscar-winning storyteller.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And it’s very much centered around the fact that ambition and discipline are really the two phases of the same coin, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And a bit of like the yin and yang.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And you can have a great ambition, but if you don’t put the hard word and those continuous improvements, you won’t be able to get there.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And yeah, that was very inspiring because sometimes, you tend to underestimate the small micro gains that we can all achieve in our daily life, whether it’s at work or not.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But then when you zoom out and you look at the compounded effect that those can have, if you are able to keep the discipline, then the impact can be quite significant.

LISA: I love it.

LISA: I’m going to have to read it.

LISA: I actually say this all the time.

LISA: I have a good friend of mine who was in professional sport as well, a Premiership footballer.

LISA: And he always used to say to me, I was never the best footballer, never the best.

LISA: But what I did is I wanted it more and I tried hard and I was there before everybody else at practice.

LISA: And I pushed myself and then he was very successful, but not because he was the best.

LISA: And I say that to my kids all the time.

LISA: You don’t have to be the best, but as long as you’ve tried hard and what have you learned out of it.

LISA: And I know we talked a bit about sport earlier because it’s a big part of both of our lives.

LISA: No, I love that book.

LISA: I’ll have to get that.

LISA: Although these days I’m finding I’m less reading than more podcast listening to.

LISA: I think that everyone’s having that shift now into less reading, more short bursts of information via podcast.

LISA: But I need to get back into reading.

LISA: Thank you for that.

LISA: So please tell us about the SMILES program.

LISA: For those that don’t know, for our global listeners, I want to know a little bit more about the SMILES program.

LISA: And also what role does it play in the UAE?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So SMILES, we are a multi-categories platform.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We host more than 60 services on it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We are primarily focused in the space of everyday services.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And we try to combine convenience, which is so important in the busy life that people have also like here in the UAE, and delight.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We serve all the people of the UAE.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So we are there for all the citizens, residents and visitors.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And that’s pretty much us.

LISA: So SMILES used to be the loyalty program for what was formerly known as Eti Salat, which is now known as EAND, the telecommunication company based here in the UAE.

LISA: And now it’s a program that is open to everybody.

LISA: So we’re going to go into a little bit of discussion on that.

LISA: But before we do, can you talk to us about why that shift?

LISA: Because Telco is very traditionally a transactional based program for telecommunication customers.

LISA: And you shifted out of that.

LISA: Why did you think that that original model wasn’t working to bring it outside of Telco?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I think you just said it in your words, because the words transaction and loyalty, I think they are really going well hand in hand.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So when this area was given to me, I felt that it was built on a very too simple kind of formula.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: The formula was too simplistic.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It was you as a customer, you stay a lot with us, you spend a lot with us, and finally we will give you something, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Which, if you ask me, didn’t sound very engaging, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And if the objective of a program is to drive engagement, you need to find a way that you are not able only to engage with your top elite set of customers, but you are able to speak to all the people.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And given that they are a telecom player, we serve all segments in the market, we need to find a way to break through into the hearts and minds of all those segments by adding some additional elements to the formula.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: The formula is still valid, obviously, economically makes a lot of sense.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We have to find a few additional variables to make it more compelling for the rest of the population.

LISA: Yeah.

LISA: And I think we talked about this when we spoke before, that actually, it’s quite rule breaking in so far as what you’ve done as being a Telco company, or actually, I think you’ve repositioned yourself, not Telco company, as a data.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Telco, yes.

LISA: Telco group to to opening up the program, opening up the program to non to other telco customers.

LISA: It’s quite a radical decision, actually.

LISA: And I can imagine that the first time, and I think you said this to me, the first time you thought of doing that, your boss said something over my dead body or something like that.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Yeah, there was a little bit of resistance at the beginning, because this started as Etisalat, which is now called The End, used to have this loyalty program since 2006.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So it was not something new.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And so the way it was seen in the organization was very much like a loyalty program.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: When SMISE was launched, which happened in 2017, it was built on the basis of that loyalty program, but with an addition of a marketplace for buy one, get one offers for things that would be relevant for a leisure of our customers.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I did see immediately a very big impact, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I mean, we could see the all the metrics, you know, going to a different order of magnitude, but obviously the mindset in the company was very much like, come on, you know, we are like, this is a loyalty program, we need to serve our audience, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It is true that when I did my first pitch for opening up to the rest of the people in this country, the reaction wasn’t very positive.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That was at the beginning of 2018, more or less.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But we were lucky, you know, because a few quarters down the line, actually we were all, everyone was very supportive of opening it up to everyone.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And then in 2019, start of 2019, Smiles became open to all the people of the UAE.

LISA: So what convinced them to allow you to make that step then?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So I think it was pretty much like a data-driven organization.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And one good thing about EN or IT Salat at the time is that data is an important element of decision making.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And we had two clear indicators that there was an opportunity to make the move.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: One was that we had a lot of people downloading the app, but not able to register onto it, because they were not eligible.

LISA: Oh wow, so you had that data already.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That was a data point.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: You could see that there was the ratio, registration to the load was kind of low.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And we could see that there was a segment to tap into.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And the second part was more like also feedback, more insight coming from another customer segment, which is the merchants for us, where many of them, they were telling us, you know what, you have a good platform, it’s digital, backed up by a big telecom organization, but it’s still limited in your reach.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So when we compare you against your competitors, you are coming across as a bit with the shortcoming that you cannot serve the full population, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So those feedback combined with the end user demand were strong enough to convince the rest of the organization to go for it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And maybe the last one, Lisa, was that with the marketplace, some new business lines also open up for us.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So gradually, we had the organization moving from looking at it as a pure co-center or as an engine for driving lifetime value of the customer on the telecom side, also as a vehicle for generating value from businesses which were not typically telecom, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And as you said before, at the time, the ambition to move away from a connectivity player to become more like a technology group was just kicking in.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So it was some luck for us that the pitch came at that moment.

LISA: And so I guess you kind of answered my next question, which is, how did you know, when did you know that strategy was actually working?

LISA: Was it because of the commercial element?

LISA: Was it customer satisfaction?

LISA: When did you see that this direction was working for you?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We had maybe three indicators again.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: One was the customers in general, the demand, and users, merchants, there was a good pent up growth and the numbers were really exciting.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: The second thing was also that internally in the organization, we moved from a situation where we would hardly talk about the loyalty program in our business review, because I was running performance reviews in the past.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We would hardly talk about this one.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It was very much like a satellite peripheral element of our portfolio, our go-to-market proposition.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Started changing because we started getting discussions around it in our weekly basis on our reviews.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And then when the strategy sessions would take place, there would be more talks about what can we do with miles.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Those signs also were very important because you need to get the support also from the organization that you’re working for to drive these transformations, let’s say.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And the third element was the people.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: In a telecom company, as you probably know, there are maybe hundreds of products and propositions which are getting launched every year.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So typically, when someone is working on one of these projects, their mindset is that, you know what, I finish this project and then I move on, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But I could see that the people were actually wanting to stick to it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Some people developed this sense of co-belonging and ownership.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We had created this smile stripe from the very beginning, and I could see that more people wanted to be part of it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So that was also a good sign that there was some good tailwind and internal engagement to drive further the changes that we wanted to bring.

LISA: So it really culturally changed internally within the business as well, because it’s not just a line on the P&L or something that sits at satellite, like you said.

LISA: It actually becomes core to the business product, but also the engagement from internal employees really kind of kicked off, and that must have just culturally changed it completely.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Yeah, it was a good, you know, at the end, I’m a marketeer at Arteras.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: When this domain was given to me, I didn’t want to just be on the very periphery of, you know, the universe, which E& represents.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So I wanted to find a way to be more commonly and frequently in part of the talks that happen in the organization.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So that required, you know, managing the senior management, the stakeholders board eventually to a certain extent, but also the people in turn, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I wanted them to be part of this trip, this journey.

LISA: What you’re describing actually is a common problem, I think, with a lot of programs where it’s seen as separate and you’re not part of the bigger conversations.

LISA: And so what you’ve done is not only transform the program and evolve it into something non-traditional for the telco industry, but also put focus on loyalty at the center of the business.

LISA: It’s not an easy task and it must have taken a bit of time, but credit to you because I think it’s the right direction.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It was a combination of determination from everyone and also a bit of luck.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But the one thing that we did was trying to move away from the traditional formula which was there.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: In the past, you use the telecom services, you get points and then you can eventually redeem those points on the telecom side.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That was not a very exciting talk to have in an organization which is continuously churning out propositions and products.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So we did things like introducing an unlimited subscription, which is our hero product, which combined all the benefits of SMILES into one.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We started finding ways to bundle it with our core proposition on the telecom side.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: All of a sudden, we had another element to bring SMILES into the conversation related to the telecom space.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So also that helped in getting more attention and more support.

LISA: Yeah, amazing.

LISA: So if we go to the SMILES program itself, and the core mantra is to bring happiness to everyone, which by the way, I love that sentence.

LISA: And you’ve also mentioned to me, and I also heard you talk about it on your previous podcast with Paula, which is that customers shouldn’t have to run a marathon to get a reward.

LISA: And I love that sentence because often that’s what you feel like, and then people become disengaged.

LISA: But in practice, it’s not as easy to set up a structure that enables people to make sure that they’re constantly feeling like they can get that reward.

LISA: How did you structure that and what are the components of that value proposition?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I mean, in my opinion, that was one of the biggest pain points that the customer had with our programme earlier, and possibly with many other programmes which are there, that you have to really be patient and before you can actually get some joy out of it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Now, in these days, with the digital becoming now, the way we run our life and everyone talking about instant gratification, marathon and instant gratification, for me they don’t go well together.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So, we wanted to bring in some, we wanted to find a way that from day one, if you’re on board on the platform, you can get some benefit out of it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Maybe not super big, not super huge, but something that would motivate you to stick to it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So, we introduced that marketplace for buy one, get one offers, which allowed us to introduce a lot of flexibility in bringing in some micro benefits for someone who joins the platform even on day one.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Obviously, we kept that incremental and exponential benefits for those who are willing to patiently wait and accumulate their points and reach to a big threshold because that’s very much fundamentally valid from an economic standpoint.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But we wanted to basically bring in much more democracy in the way customers can enjoy it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: In the end, the name Smiles started also from the idea of trying to bring a little bit of happiness and joy to everyone.

LISA: So when I listened to your previous podcast, you talked about with Paula the grocery, the acquisition of a grocery partner, adding that into the app as a proposition.

LISA: What else have you added in and what impact has that grocery partner had on the program?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So for us, moving from leisure to everyday services was very useful from driving engagement because we all know that busy life, the times to really have some time for leisure is very limited, back to our conversation earlier on.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But there are essential things that, whether we like it or not, we have to deal with every day.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Things like eating, I personally love to engage with it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It’s not a pain for me.

LISA: Yeah, me too.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But also spending for essentials for your house or grocery, and later on also taking care of your household.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: There are different things that you require, whether it’s cleaning services or home improvement.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So back to your question on the…

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We decided to acquire a platform which was already established in the market, because we also felt that it’s not always right to build things in-house.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And that brought in a lot of family focus into our proposition, because the grocery is more like, especially our proposition is more into family shopping.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So we are to give you maybe some more details about it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We do have on one side the marketplace where you can connect with multiple retailers, but also we have our own store, which is called Smiles Market, which is there catering for the weekly shopping, the family shopping.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So having that proposition onto the Smiles App brought in on one side, a lot of more attention from families, from segments which belong into families, and also a lot of spend as well.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Gross merchandise value at the end is a big metric for us.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And the gross is a big booster of the particular metric.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Especially this happened in the years after 2020-2021, where we were all started changing our lifestyle significantly.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So it was very much required for a platform that is focusing on everyday needs to enter also into the grocery space.

LISA: And I guess there’s quite a lot of competition actually in this market.

LISA: A lot of people have gone in down similar directions.

LISA: How do you feel, how do you compete with that as SMILES?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So we have our philosophies to combine, as I was saying earlier on, flexibility with convenience, with delight.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So we always want to add a rewarding element into your experiences, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That’s one differential that we have.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: At this point in time, we are doing that primarily with the user points, with our currency of happiness, the SMILES points.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But moving on, we are looking at personalization as one of the items, one of the areas that will allow us to bring the delight, because it will make easier for the customer to use the service.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That’s number one.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Number two, the market is primarily focusing on what we call technically top-up shopping.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So you are going back home now and you suddenly need something.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We offer that to our marketplace, but our own warehouse, which is the Smiles Market, is predominantly into chill van deliveries.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So it’s more like your weekly shopping.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: On that particular space, it’s less crowded than on the top-up segment.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And that’s where we’re focusing on.

LISA: Interesting.

LISA: And I’ve also noticed that you’ve really evolved your partners recently.

LISA: You’ve got more and more, you’ve got Etihad back, which I was really happy to see, and a few other partners that are also allowing the two-way transfer, which I think we had discussed is something that you don’t always see.

LISA: So what was the decision-making around adding these partners back in, but also the two-way transfer?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I mean, it’s about also the flexibility that we were talking about, you know.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: At the end, if you want to be customer-centric, you need to try to eliminate some barriers for the customers, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And I think in the loyalty space, we have so many rules that we built over the years that make it difficult for the customer.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: If you look at, for example, another industry like traveling, there is so much improvement which has happened on the space, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Now you can get visa and arrival much more easily than before.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Sometimes you can even get your face scanned and then you can migrate into a country.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Currencies are universally accepted.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So I found it very, I would say, antiquated, you know, the loyalty space, which is like a very, at the end, it’s like a niche element of customer’s life, that you still have all those rules.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And I guess, you know, this customer centricity and this understanding is shared across the industry.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So we see more and more large programs that are open to have that kind of bilateral exchange and no more insisting on one-way only exchange like it used to be in the past.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So now, on the Smiles app, we do a spoke about Etihadga Smiles, which we’re very happy to onboard and to partner up with a few months ago.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But we do have a lot of other tier one programs here in the UE.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Share, we have Shukran, we have James Rewards and several others already interconnected on this blockchain platform back to your…

LISA: And I think that that’s really helpful.

LISA: Certainly for me, I’m 21 years in this country now, and I’ve been an EAND customer since the day I landed.

LISA: Same number, actually, which I get a lot of calls on.

LISA: But what the partnerships give for me is a different value proposition.

LISA: I think that’s also very difficult with a program where you’re taping in…

LISA: You’re one of the largest programs in the country.

LISA: You’re taping in to customers at all different levels.

LISA: Providing value or making me smile versus making John smile or anybody else smile.

LISA: You’ve got a lot to consider because there’s lots of different requirements across the broad spectrum of customers there.

LISA: And I think adding in some of those partners certainly made me smile because it’s obviously connected to me.

LISA: But it is a difficult ask to satisfy and try to make every customer group happy.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: You can’t always do it by yourself.

LISA: And you can’t, no.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I think that’s the evolution which is happening nowadays.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: This collaboration is more pronounced across the board.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And even in the loyalty space, in the lifestyle space, it’s hardly you can have everything done in house, number one.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And also it’s almost impossible that you can always be the number one on top of my brand that consumers would think of when they are looking at how to spend their leisure time, for example.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So it’s obviously everyone would want to be always the number one, but it’s also good to be sometimes number two and get your partner to take that number one spot.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Because one day things might change around and you might be there supporting them by being the number one for the same user.

LISA: Yeah, 100%.

LISA: Never think of it like that, but you’re absolutely right.

LISA: You touched on personalization a few minutes ago and it’s a big topic and I hate to bring it up actually because I feel like it’s been over talked personalization.

LISA: But I also feel like people don’t really do it either.

LISA: People talk about it and they don’t really action it.

LISA: And when we were talking, you said that 25% of the user experience is personalized.

LISA: So I’d love to talk a little bit about that.

LISA: What are you learning from the part of the experience that is personalized?

LISA: Is it yielding the results you expect?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Most of the time, yes.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And it can be very positive.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It can go up to 5x in terms of conversion.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But it’s not always that you get it right from the very beginning.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: At the end, it’s not only that the model needs to learn by itself.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It’s also the way as an organization we need to learn from it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So I think in our case, it’s been very rewarding.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So we want to go from that 20-25% that we spoke about the other day to 100%.

LISA: That is the goal.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That is the goal, because at the end, it’s too overwhelming.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It’s good to have 60-plus services and then we are going to add more.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But if we just put all of those onto the face of the customer from day one, it will be overwhelming.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: A customer might feel intimidated and just not be willing to do that very first step.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So it’s important that we do the journey with the customer step by step.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Maybe we start walking and then over a period of time we’ll be running.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So that’s the beauty of personalisation.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So in our case, even in the Telecom side, where we started earlier, we’ve seen amazing results.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And so that’s why we’re also bringing it on the lifestyles.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And the number one impact is a metric that you see benefiting from it is the conversion.

LISA: Yeah, amazing.

LISA: And I guess as a Telecom company, you do have a lot of data.

LISA: Imagine you’ve got a lot of data, a lot of analytics tools there looking at that data and how to optimise it.

LISA: What are the biggest challenges then to actually funnelling that and making decisions from what data sets?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I mean, we do have a lot of data, but I think everyone has a lot of data in general.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: There is a lot to…

LISA: Do they use it though?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That’s the question, because at the end, that’s our responsibility as marketeers, that we really need to make good use of that data.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So in our case, we have a couple of challenges that we have experienced.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Number one is that, even though we’ve been growing very fast, and sometimes even inorganically, the data is not always consistently structured.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So for you to connect the dots, for me to connect the fact that you are into Thai food, and you’re also traveling to Thailand, and you are maybe shopping from certain retailers, it’s not necessarily immediately available, unless I’m able to have a consistent structure of the data.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And then I can start connecting the dots and try to build this super profile of Lisa and knowing that she’s probably interested in traveling, and maybe it’s Easter time, and I should make a recommendation for a ski trip somewhere in Europe, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That’s one element.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So the consistency of data is important.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: The second one is also the data literacy.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: At the end, one of the mantra that we have within SMILES is that we want to make data king and queen.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Because I think that simplifies the way decisions are taken.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But obviously, when you have a large team, having the ability for everyone to select the right data point to make the decision is not always there.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So there is always a lot of coaching required to get to a good level where decisions are taken in the most logical and analytical way.

LISA: And so you typically will analyse the data you have.

LISA: Have you ever considered then asking the customer extra data, like progressive profiling or getting specific information from them to drive a more personalised experience based on what the customer wants?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We do surveys as well.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: At the time, we know we…

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Because first of all, you know, also the way when we do profiling of customers, we have, you know, there is an ambition to go to a segment of one, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: In order to make sure that you are in the right direction, you need to do some researches sometime to validate whether you are understanding is correct or not.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But we do use extensively research to try to augment the profile, getting additional preferences of the customer.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So these personas that we try to build are going sometimes beyond what we can see from our own data.

LISA: Okay, good.

LISA: I like it when people do that to me as a consumer.

LISA: I like to have a say in that journey.

LISA: But yeah, so with all this data, with all this complexity of the value proposition, with all this added value that you’ve created, sometimes I feel like simplicity is underrated, and sometimes value propositions can be a lot for the consumer.

LISA: How do you balance making sure that the proposition is not over-complicating, sometimes sophisticated structures?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I think that’s an area where definitely we can do much better.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Because we’ve been over-hyped by introducing a lot of benefits and services to the Smiles app.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We reached the point that it can be too complex for the people to look at it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So one of the things that we have done is that we have created this product that I was mentioning earlier on, which is our subscription, which brings in the best of Smiles into one product.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So you don’t have to learn too much about all the different propositions which are there.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: You can just subscribe to our Smiles Unlimited, and then you will get the best of the food world, the best of the grocery delivery world, the best of home services and best of deals, so buy one get one offers as well.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So that’s one way of simplify a little bit the experience for the customer.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: You package the experiences into one rather than having them to learn one by one.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That’s one element.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: The second element is also the personalization that we just spoke.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: You know, through personalization, we will be able to get more into the next best action kind of an approach, where we, rather than portraying you too many things in one go, just show you one at a time, which is probably the most one, the one where you will be reacting and connecting to the most.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And what else can we do there on the particular front of the simplicity?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I think also it’s a matter of, let’s say, allowing you to customize more.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: At the end, as a customer, you might want to also create the real estate.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: You might want to be in a position of deciding what to see and what not to see.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We obviously do our best at trying to do that on your behalf, but some customers, they really want to go into their personalization.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: They want to come up with their own Picasso painting, and maybe we need to allow them to do their own craft of it.

LISA: I love that.

LISA: I’m really into the ability for…

LISA: Let me tell you how I want this to look.

LISA: I think that we’ll see more of that coming up.

LISA: Let’s see if Smiles does it next.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It will make you keep smiling.

LISA: See, that’s what makes me smile.

LISA: Another element.

LISA: I guess, another topic that I also don’t like bringing up, but I will because we can’t not in some ways, is AI and machine learning.

LISA: So you, as Ian, I can imagine have a lot of tools running in the background to help you make that decisioning.

LISA: What role will that take in the kind of evolution of Smiles moving forward?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So advanced analytics, it’s very important.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: We just spoke about having a lot of data points, a lot of personalization, definitely benefits from that.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Because if you want to really bring it, you cannot do it based on business rules.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: You need to have some models that take that complexity a little bit away from you.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So that’s an area, we already spoke about it.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But the other area which is going to be benefit a lot from analytics or advanced analytics is the operations, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Because at the end, we do manage, with all these marketplaces that we have on the platform, we do manage large operations, directly or indirectly.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And that entails all our champions, which are the ones delivering food to our food delivery customers, or our technicians that come to take care of your house, if you need some assistance, or the people who pick items from the stores.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Now, all of this, it’s huge in size, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And at the end, you want to optimize the way this is done to make it more efficient.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So learning from the data points can be extremely useful to make the best use of the resources.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I’ll just give you an example, maybe, to make it less philosophical and more practical.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: In our smile market, we have 10,000 items, or technically called SKUs, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It’s a pretty large one, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And let’s say that you now, Lisa, you place an order, you’re ordering some detergents and some fruits and vegetables and some products for personal care.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Now, it makes a big difference whether the, and I’m the picker, I’m the one who’s going to pick those items and put it in a basket, and I hand it over to someone, we’ll deliver it to your home.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It makes a big difference whether I, which path I follow inside the warehouse to go and pick your order.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Because if I knew that, you know, the detergents are first, and then the personal care is coming after in the second aisle, and the fruits and vegetables are at the end of the store, I would follow that order.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But if I am not suggested which path to follow, I might actually go from product number one, which is on one side of the warehouse, then go to product number two, which is maybe on the other side of the warehouse, and then come back.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: That alone, it’s a waste of time, which results in to, let’s say, a less optimal use of my time, and also not ideal experience for you as a customer, because maybe you’ll end up waiting a little bit longer for your order to be delivered.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But these, you know, gains on, which are not customer facing, are actually very, very beneficial.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And actually, if you want to experiment with the advanced analytics, there are a lot of people that say better to start from those which are not facing the end user, because they’re less risky, start more in house.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And then, you know, eventually when you feel that you are getting to almost like a black belt kind of level on advanced analytics, move to more customer facing advanced analytics and expose that intelligence to the end user.

LISA: That is so interesting.

LISA: So, do you use a technology to support educating the person going to get the detergent and the strawberries or whatever they’re getting?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Yeah.

LISA: On their device to say…

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: On their device.

LISA: On this part, you need to take this part.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So now, when I say that this is Lisa’s order, and these three items which I need to pick, it tells me exactly which one to go first, which one to go second.

LISA: Oh, that’s very smart.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Yes.

LISA: And so I’ve got to follow on to that.

LISA: I feel like we can have another conversation about this.

LISA: With the person that’s doing the organisation of the shopping, I don’t know what you call…

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Pickers.

LISA: The pickers, thank you.

LISA: How do you make them smile?

LISA: Do you do like an employee or a picker program?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It’s a very good question, because at the end, in a marketplace, you’re right, there are three customer segments.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: There is the end user, the merchants, and what we call the champions, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So champions, obviously we have a number of initiatives to keep them engaged.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: For example, recently there was something fun where we had the delivery champions taking some time off, because the Harley-Davidson bikers went and took their jobs.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So they went, the standard delivery champions went playing bowling, and then we had the Harley-Davidson bikers that went and did the actual delivery.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But what really matters for all our champions?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Most of the time, their remuneration is driven by the number of, for example, orders that they are able to fulfill or not.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So this technology actually helps them making a better use of their time.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So that’s also, it’s a sort of a win-win, right?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: The end user wins because it gets the service faster.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: The organization also enjoys better utilization of the resources, but the resource themselves, they are able actually to make a better ROI out of their time.

LISA: It’s amazing.

LISA: I would never have thought of thinking about those elements of operational delivery and making that faster and the impact it has on all the parties.

LISA: I think we’ll have to have more conversation.

LISA: We might have to do a podcast just on that.

LISA: So I know we’re going to have to wrap up in a minute because we’re coming close to time.

LISA: I do have two questions I would like to ask.

LISA: Firstly, you’ve done a lot of changes to the program.

LISA: Very impressive in terms of the shift and how that’s migrated and creating a real ecosystem lifestyle program that’s commercially driven.

LISA: How do you measure the success of that and the impact of that internally?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So internally, it’s obviously the customer metrics play a role.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I mean, at the end, we are very, like many other organizations, we are customer centric and the customer impact, whether it’s engagement on the app, their satisfaction, these metrics are very important to us, number one.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Number two also is the interest from other stakeholders.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: The number of organizations who are coming across, wanting to do business with Smiles has increased significantly over the years.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So that’s also a good validation that plans, strategies are working well.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So those two elements, I think, do the magic internally in getting the organization to continue supporting the trajectory of growth that we are pursuing.

LISA: I wanted to ask that because obviously there’s the standard metrics that people are going to need to have, but I was thinking that you would have something different.

LISA: Because the way that you think, in terms of breaking rules, going outside of the convention, or I was thinking that you’d probably have a metric like that, that you’re measuring against.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I mean, it’s probably not very new for you, but in our company, when we started going digital, there was a big focus on the number of downloads.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I’m also running the analytics and insights, so the downloads was really the big thing.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But from day one on Smiles, we’ve been looking more at the engagement, so whether you are going to the app, whether you are, how much time you’re spending, how many sessions you’re doing, are you transacting only on one category or multiple categories.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: I know this is very much orthodox, it’s common.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But for us, for E&, it was a bit new when we started the journey back then.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But maybe I’ll think of something a little bit more different for our next chat.

LISA: Good.

LISA: And so very last, final question for you.

LISA: What’s the future look like?

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: The future look like.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: So more on the product side, we will evolve Smiles into a digital shopping mall where we have existing services will serve as anchor services for the mall.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And then we will have partners coming up with the mini apps.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: This is something we’ve been working on for the last 12 months.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: It will happen very soon.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: But to tell you the truth, the thing which I’m most excited about, rather than obviously these milestones are nice, but it’s more like this journey of getting 1% better every day.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: And the more people I’m able to get on this journey, I think the more rewarding the future is going to be.

LISA: Amazing.

LISA: Well, thank you so much for joining us.

LISA: And I really am interested in the journey you’ve taken to kind of really revolutionise loyalty in some ways.

LISA: So thank you for explaining.

LISA: I’m looking forward to the next one, where we can start talking about some of these things we’ve started today.

LISA: So thank you for coming.

LISA: It’s a pleasure to have you.

LISA: And thank you for the listeners of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV.

LISA: If you want to be in touch with Antonio, you can find him on LinkedIn, I would imagine.

LISA: But thank you very much for listening and I’ll see you next time.

ANTONIO RICCIARDI: Thank you, Lisa.

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

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