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 Amanda Cromhout, the founder of Truth and International Loyalty Consultancy.
Paula: She’s also the author of the book Blind Loyalty, 101 Loyalty Concepts Radically Simplified.
Paula: Enjoy.
Paula: I’m delighted to announce Capillary Technologies as the new title sponsor for Loyalty TV.
Paula: Capillary’s mission is to bring the loyalty market out of the 1980s and into the present.
Paula: Ditching the slow, chunky manual services of the past.
Paula: Capillary is all about making loyalty management easy, with scalable AI-powered tech that turns loyalty managers into superheroes.
Paula: Say goodbye to outdated methods and check out the exciting new way to achieve loyalty excellence in 2024.
Amanda: It’s always such an honor to interview real professionals.
Amanda: So today’s interview is with Tanya Alexander.
Amanda: She is the AVP of Loyalty and Operations for Arvind Fashions Ltd in India.
Amanda: And it’s a mightily impressive organization.
Amanda: With the annual turnover of 500 million US dollars, 30 plus years in operation and over 10 million customers.
Amanda: But what’s most impressive about this interview with Tanya is she talks through the different brands that she represents in Arvind Fashions.
Amanda: But that then translates into operating different loyalty programs.
Amanda: So you can imagine she’s not talking about just managing one loyalty program, but it’s different loyalty programs.
Amanda: The actual challenges she’s facing cuts across Chinese walls that she has to manage, transactional into emotional loyalty, and actually omni-channel, which is something she is really trying to get their strategy to solve for in Arvind Fashions.
Amanda: She gives us a mini masterclass in how to use AI in loyalty.
Amanda: I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I do.
Amanda: So Tanya, welcome, welcome, welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV.
Amanda: You are the AVP of Loyalty and Operations for Arvind Fashions Ltd.
Amanda: I think you know, Tanya, that the opening question on Loyalty TV has changed a little bit since last year.
Amanda: So what is your favorite either business read or business book?
Tanya: Okay.
Tanya: So I’m a voracious reader, but I don’t read books on business.
Tanya: But I do like reading articles on The Ken, which is a Bangalore-based online magazine.
Tanya: They do very interesting deep dives into what brands are doing, customer behavior and trends and particularly those with global impact.
Tanya: So I find those very interesting.
Tanya: And any studies on customer behavior, loyalty trends and of course anything that Forrester Publishing or Mckinsey, I watch out for those.
Tanya: Yeah.
Tanya: So that’s what I read.
Amanda: You know, it’s so interesting.
Amanda: I’m finding more and more people I talk to because I talk through Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty, but also through other mediums.
Amanda: When I talk about business books, that’s more common to hear your response than actually a book that gets named.
Amanda: So clearly the world has been changed.
Amanda: Yeah.
Amanda: Whereas I’m still a little bit in the dinosaur fashion and I’m still using books.
Amanda: But amazing.
Amanda: So your role is Gog and Joom.
Amanda: You’re part of a beautiful big company that we’re going to unpack in a moment.
Amanda: But take us through the steps.
Amanda: I think it’s always one of the most interesting questions for the viewers of Let’s Talk Loyalty and listeners and viewers of Loyalty TV.
Amanda: Take us through your steps because it’s got lots of loyalty work in it.
Amanda: But from what you told me before also, you’re in fashion, in loyalty, and it’s almost like the perfect mixture of both to get you to where you are now.
Tanya: So I’m a fashion marketing graduate, 21 years of work experience.
Tanya: I started my career in retail operations, which was where I got my first brush with loyalty programs, moved into brand marketing, where I was the marketing head for two international brands here in India.
Tanya: At some point, we decided to split the marketing function and move CRM out of marketing.
Tanya: And I found the whole CRM piece very, very interesting because the customer was the center of gravity.
Tanya: Everything was bases, what the customer wanted, why they were buying from us, a lot of data.
Tanya: And I just found the space very interesting and challenging.
Tanya: So I’ve been doing Loyalty exclusively for 15 years.
Tanya: So a very organic move into being a Loyalty professional.
Tanya: Yeah.
Amanda: That’s what I love about it.
Amanda: I mean, if I think of my career as well, I started off as an airline professional with Loyalty.
Amanda: And then ultimately, I think utopia for me is if I can work on airline programs as well as other industries.
Amanda: So remembering that the audience of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV is a global audience.
Amanda: And your brand, as much as it is obviously incredibly well known in India, Arvind Fashions is not so well known globally.
Amanda: So please talk us through the actual company.
Amanda: We’ll talk about the loyalty program in a moment.
Amanda: But I think the size of the company, the success of the company, the number of stores and so on really, really impressed me.
Amanda: So I think let’s share that.
Amanda: It would be a really great story to understand.
Tanya: Yeah.
Tanya: So Arvind Fashions is the retail arm of Arvind Relimited, which has century old roots in fabric manufacturing, cotton and denim.
Tanya: Chances are that if you buy a shirt or a pair of jeans in India, you’re buying a piece of Arvind.
Tanya: That’s how far back we go.
Tanya: So it was a very natural progression into the business of brands and retail.
Tanya: We now have a portfolio over the years, of course, many brands.
Tanya: But right now, I think there’s a very sharp focus.
Tanya: Five brands, two distinct retail formats.
Tanya: And that’s what Arvind Fashions is about.
Tanya: Annual revenue of about 500 million USD, 30 plus years of retail experience, a thousand exclusive brand outlets.
Tanya: And of course, we have additional points of sale in department stores and multi-brand outlets.
Tanya: I think our distribution network spans 450 cities and towns in India, which is a lot, given the size of our country.
Tanya: And pretty strong 10 million customer database.
Amanda: I think that’s the bit we’re going to hang our hats on in a moment to talk about that, because a 10 million database for such an established brand.
Amanda: I mean, the time you’ve been in the market, the extents of 450 cities or towns is just remarkable.
Amanda: I guess it gives you a sense of the size of India there as well.
Amanda: It’s not to be misunderstood.
Amanda: So what I love that is how you said the chances are if you’re buying a shirt that you bought it at some stage from Arvind Fashions.
Amanda: So I think that gives you a sense as well as probably the market share that your company is commanding in India.
Amanda: What are those brands?
Amanda: Because I know they’re vastly different.
Amanda: And I think that’s what leads us into the next question when we start talking about loyalty, is that the brands you represent are very different and different customer segments.
Tanya: Yeah, so that is the strategy.
Tanya: We have five brands, as I said, you know, all brands operate, these brands operate in different price points, different product categories, different customer segments.
Tanya: So we have Flying Machine, for instance, which is a homegrown Indian brand, Denim brand, targeted mainly at Gen Z consumers.
Tanya: We have US Polo ASSN, which is a casual wear menswear brand.
Tanya: We also have Kidswear with US Polo.
Tanya: We have Arrow, which is in the formal menswear space.
Tanya: And then of course, we have Tommy L.
Tanya: Figer and Calvin Klein, which is your bridge to luxury consumers, both casual wear as well as Denim.
Tanya: Two retail formats.
Tanya: One is a multi-brand footwear retail store, and the other one is a multi-brand apparel store, a network of stores.
Tanya: Yes.
Tanya: So, yeah, so I think that was the idea.
Tanya: Very differentiated customer value proposition as well.
Tanya: You know, we don’t want too much of an overlap, which is good.
Tanya: You know, and then customers are able to probably buy us for different occasions as well.
Tanya: So that’s the idea.
Amanda: Yes.
Amanda: And I mean, you sent me your investor relations pack and I looked through it with absolute envy because the merchandise I saw was beautiful.
Amanda: Like it was, you know, you actually feel, you feel the energy behind those brands just by by being part of your overall Arvind Fashions company.
Amanda: So I can understand why you’ve got such reach and such established results in your home market.
Amanda: So my next question is a really obvious one.
Amanda: But actually, I think before you and I chatted, I had made the wrong conclusion.
Amanda: So my question to you when we were just talking about this was, well, if you’ve got five brands within one organization offering fashion, have you pulled it all together within one loyalty program?
Amanda: Many of us listening to this show are professionals managing just one loyalty program.
Amanda: But I think your response now is going to highlight the complexity of the role that you’re commanding.
Amanda: So please talk us through the structure of the loyalty experience as well for customers.
Tanya: Yeah.
Tanya: Yeah.
Tanya: So five brands, two retail formats.
Tanya: So we’re running in a sense seven loyalty programs.
Tanya: So quite complex.
Tanya: You know, in terms of the strategy, of course, we keep customer at the center of gravity.
Tanya: We look at data.
Tanya: Everything is designed based on that.
Tanya: And there is homogeneity in terms of designing the program structure in the sense that, for instance, the basket of benefits are pretty much the same for all loyalty programs.
Tanya: You will have, for instance, a welcome benefit.
Tanya: You would have a birthday benefit.
Tanya: So we’ve kept that pretty much standard.
Tanya: Reporting as well, there’s homogeneity in that, because again, loyalty KPIs are more or less agnostic of the industry or the product or the brand.
Tanya: You know, what we’re looking for is the health of the program and whether it’s working and the ROI, those KPIs remain the same.
Tanya: And of course, looking at different formats would drive us all crazy.
Tanya: So, you know, it’s faster to pull out insights when you have that standardization.
Tanya: But that’s where the similarity ends.
Tanya: Everything else is differentiated.
Tanya: So we look to the brands for that.
Tanya: The strategy and the vision is driven by the brand teams because really at the essence of it is what the brand stands for, what the business requirements are, who the brand’s customer is.
Tanya: So we look at all of that when we are designing the loyalty program strategy.
Tanya: And each brand works independently, so we run these programs independently of each other.
Tanya: But of course, we are responsible for the execution of it, the execution of the brand’s vision, but we expect the brand to drive it.
Tanya: That’s the idea.
Amanda: And I guess with that, the brand owners are closer to the customer, the customer segmentation, and really understanding how to maximize that relationship.
Amanda: Which leads me nicely into my next question.
Amanda: Because of the size of India as a consumer base, the size of your database being 10 million plus, the size of the stores and the size of the reach you’ve got, how do you approach not just the running of the loyalty program, but how do you approach the communication strategy?
Amanda: Like what is your member engagement approach and channels that you use to execute that?
Tanya: So, still quite old school because that’s what works in the market here.
Tanya: We use SMS text messaging, which works very strongly in India, WhatsApp, rich content SMS, which is RCS.
Tanya: I’m very proud of the fact that some of our apparel brands were among the first brands to use it during COVID using WhatsApp and RCS.
Tanya: These channels have worked for us.
Tanya: Now, I know that in global markets and other markets, email is a form of communication, a channel that is used quite well.
Tanya: But here in India, in the offline world, that’s a bit of a challenge.
Tanya: People are fine sharing their mobile number.
Tanya: For us, the mobile number is the unique identifier.
Tanya: We have a system in India called the OTP, which is the one-time password, and it’s used everywhere.
Tanya: It’s an added layer of security.
Tanya: We use it in banking, we use it in telecom, we use it in consumer goods.
Tanya: People have no problem sharing their mobile number.
Tanya: But email address, that’s a different thing altogether.
Tanya: So in the offline world, it’s very hard for us to collect this information.
Tanya: But of course, for customers who are transacting online with us, they of course will give their email address because that’s a very natural expectation when you’re expecting the bill, you’re expecting delivery notifications, all of that on email.
Tanya: But as our brands start their brand websites, have their apps, we will be moving to email as a channel of communication for sure.
Tanya: So I see that happening in the next one or two years.
Tanya: Another tool of communication we use, and that’s something which again, which always, I have to remind myself that old school still works.
Tanya: Even however big we are, when we look at the scale, sometimes in a very micro way, some of these things of course work.
Tanya: And that is the old school method of calling consumers.
Tanya: So we use this in a very discerning way.
Tanya: Limited markets, it really depends on the kind of store, the store manager, the kind of staff that is there in the store.
Tanya: And we call customers, only certain customers of course, those that we want to know when the latest merchandise is in store, or would like to be told where their vouchers are expiring, or when it’s their birthday.
Tanya: So we use that.
Tanya: But again, like I said, Amanda, it’s used very sparingly, and we leave it to the operations team to drive this.
Tanya: Yeah.
Amanda: Quite interesting that you said it’s old school, because I know there’s a lot of markets that don’t use WhatsApp at all, and then there’s some markets that use it so effectively.
Amanda: And actually, I’m listening to you.
Amanda: There’s a lot of parallels between India and South Africa where I’m based.
Amanda: So WhatsApp is starting to be really well used in customer communication and loyalty program sort of interactivity.
Amanda: It’s not just for communication.
Amanda: It’s actually a bot that’s responding to what I need.
Amanda: And the OTP structure, the one time password is critical here as well.
Amanda: So maybe it’s a fraud play from the banking industry that’s now been successfully used as well in the loyalty industry.
Amanda: So, you know, as you say, you feel like it’s not really that modern a channel.
Amanda: I think WhatsApp is very much only used in certain markets and successfully so.
Tanya: Yes, that’s true.
Amanda: So whilst we’re all, as I said, many of us are running or listeners are running one program and all the challenges that go with that.
Amanda: You’ve identified why you’ve made the choice to have five, or you said extended potentially to seven programs.
Amanda: What are the main challenges you’re facing?
Amanda: Because that’s a huge portfolio.
Amanda: That’s a lot of I really like the way you described as some similarity through the programs, like whether it’s birthday messages or welcome approach and so on.
Amanda: But then there’s this vast different depending on what the brand needs.
Amanda: What are the challenges?
Amanda: Because there must be lots.
Tanya: Yeah, lots.
Tanya: Of course, the first one is putting Chinese walls across these programs, right?
Tanya: So the danger is the similarity.
Tanya: You’re sending campaigns at the same time.
Tanya: Everything sounds the same.
Tanya: The kind of campaigns that are running also are sounding the same in terms of the trigger points.
Tanya: So that’s something that we try to focus on to ensure that we don’t replicate it.
Tanya: Best practices, of course, needs to be practiced and pass that down to the various teams, so that’s fine.
Tanya: But we do, so we have different program managers handling different brands.
Tanya: We don’t have them sort of overlapping too much because again, that danger of replication comes in.
Tanya: So looking for, making sure that there’s differentiation between the programs, that is one of the big challenges that we do.
Tanya: And the other one, which is the big one, and I think all loyalty program managers face this, is moving from transactional rewards to experiential rewards.
Tanya: So all of the loyalty data tells us that customers didn’t want that, they want their value, but something beyond discounts as well.
Tanya: Maybe can they exchange their points for something else with other partners?
Tanya: Can they choose when they want to redeem points or have two times points a day kind of thing?
Tanya: They choose all of these things.
Tanya: That’s fine.
Tanya: But then anything more than that, which moves into the area of experiences, I think that’s a tough one, you know?
Tanya: And we get caught up in the transaction part of it, that we’re rewarding them every time they come for the transaction.
Tanya: That is challenging.
Tanya: So moving from there to a more experiential view, that’s a big challenge for us.
Tanya: I think Omni is the other big one, with our businesses increasingly becoming omni with the website as well as our offline channel.
Tanya: You know, changing consumer behavior, a customer who is used to buying in an offline store to get them to buy online, we see that move happening.
Tanya: That’s probably easier because everybody is becoming increasingly more digital.
Tanya: So, you know, we see that that’s an easier move.
Tanya: But online to offline is much harder.
Tanya: Why would they come to a store, right?
Tanya: So would you give them a CRM benefit for coming to the store?
Tanya: Would you give them free alteration, personalization?
Tanya: The online consumer moving offline, offline consumer moving online, making it omni is a big focus for us.
Tanya: And again, we are talking about multiple brands, multiple customer figures in the CLM journey, but ensuring all of it is omni.
Tanya: You know, we want customers to know that this is seamless.
Tanya: So whether you’re buying on the website, whether you’re visiting a store, all your benefits are still valid and, you know, your transactions are recorded and all the nudges also happen, keeping in mind that they are buying in both these worlds.
Tanya: Yeah.
Tanya: So that’s a challenge, but a big focus area for us.
Amanda: Yeah, of course.
Amanda: I mean, fascinating on the omni channel discussion.
Amanda: And in my book, Blind Loyalty, we have a chapter on omni channel, and I interviewed previously a lady called Milani Van Roy, who runs the Clicks Clubcard program.
Amanda: It’s very celebrated globally, but certainly here in South Africa.
Amanda: And she states that an omni customer, so either switching for, it’s typically from offline to online as well, or using their app as well, is worth 3.7 times more than a single channel user.
Amanda: So I’m sure millions of brands can probably say a similar story, but actually it’s critical to understand that, because all the effort you have to go into, it’s great to be able to prove the value of that, because it’s a lot of effort, as you say.
Amanda: My favourite question, because I’m very commercial in how I approach loyalty programs.
Amanda: So I know sometimes brands can’t give away raw data and lots of insights, especially as a listed company.
Amanda: But what would you take away as your top three KPIs that you and your team or the brand owners focus on in the actual programs?
Tanya: Yes, so new customer acquisition is a KPI that we follow very strongly.
Tanya: What we do is, we’re also responsible for CRM training in stores, and this is one KPI which is within the store’s power.
Tanya: So, enrollment efficiency is the KPI which goes hand in hand with the number of enrollments that they’re making on a daily basis.
Tanya: But we keep telling our store teams that this is the one KPI that you can actually drive.
Tanya: There’s only so much that we can do in the back end, right?
Tanya: But we share that data with them, so the operations teams know exactly where their stores stand.
Tanya: And the enrollment efficiency that we would be always chasing would be between 90 to 95%, so that’s what we look at as the baseline.
Tanya: The second one is new to repeat, so you know, as a loyalty professional, you know this very well, that, you know, consumers have a natural life cycle.
Tanya: They drop off, that this is a fact of life.
Tanya: Customers upgrade, we move on to other competitors, and in the fashion space, we have a lot of competitors, so this happens, and it’s far harder to get a customer who’s been with the brand for three years to repeat.
Tanya: There is a drop off, but it’s easier to get your newer customers to repeat.
Tanya: What we look at is whether these repeats are happening in the same year of acquisition.
Tanya: New to repeat percentage is something that we track across our brands.
Tanya: The third one is win back.
Tanya: How many of our older customers are we winning back?
Tanya: We have a certain percentage target that we chase.
Tanya: But over and above that, and of course, the baseline is if you have a customer who is visiting us after two years of not buying anything from us, that’s a win back.
Tanya: But what percentage of these win backs were acquired four years ago, five years ago?
Tanya: The reason is because a lot of our brands are going through so much of change, so much of work has happened in terms of product premiumization, addition of new product categories, addition of women’s wear, for instance, a new retail identity.
Tanya: If you’re able to win back customers who we acquired four or five years ago, obviously, the brand is doing something right.
Tanya: So that’s a KPI that we share, because I think that gives them that insight as well, that something is working.
Amanda: You talk about at the start of the answer to KPI, you talked about how consumers naturally their life cycle will disappear.
Amanda: And there was a reference in a previous interview I did with Professor Dan McCarthy where he talks about consumers are like melting ice cubes, they eventually all melt away.
Tanya: That’s a good analogy actually, yes.
Amanda: Yeah, and then I’ve seen a lot of brands doing some fantastic work measuring, as you said, you’ve got that time to repurchase or time to activate in that first 12 months.
Amanda: So some very powerful KPIs that I think are shared across different industries and different territories.
Amanda: So to manage all this, I’m sure it’s not just you running around in a very frenzied way.
Amanda: Talk to us, the loyalty professionals listening to this show always love to understand team structures and team size.
Amanda: And we’ve had some companies on here, I think I heard Qantas talk about 600 in their team, or some of the companies I have the privilege of working with may only have five people in their team, but still have a gargantuan business.
Amanda: Tell us about the size of your business and the structure of it and how you manage that.
Tanya: Yeah, so it’s a team of 10 people.
Tanya: And we are very fortunate that CRM is a separate function.
Tanya: We consider ourselves quite retail adjacent, but it is a central function with dotted lines to all of the brand teams and the operations teams.
Tanya: So 10 people, varied types of experiences.
Tanya: We have people from marketing.
Tanya: We have people with vendor agency experience.
Tanya: We have people who’ve spent time in a store, retail operations, as well as people who have point of sale tech expertise.
Tanya: So then it’s a more holistic function because we are able to then service the brand’s needs better as well as that of a loyalty program because all of this is addressed in one team itself.
Amanda: I always say I’ve often been asked the question around what advice would you give maybe your former self 30 years ago or a young professional starting out in wanting to be in loyalty.
Amanda: And I’d say exactly that.
Amanda: Like, don’t go straight into loyalty, deeply into loyalty, get broader business experience because at the end of the day, loyalty touches everything, whether it’s operations, whether it’s commercial, whether it’s marketing.
Amanda: So it sounds like you’ve got that in the team as a great grounding, so to speak.
Amanda: Tell us about your favorite innovation in the work that you’ve managed to deliver.
Amanda: Like, either from your point of view or that you’ve had feedback from your teams or customers about.
Tanya: So, well, you know, in our business, I find innovation to be quite a loaded word.
Tanya: You know, why reinvent the wheel?
Tanya: This is, you know, loyalty is still very old school.
Tanya: I think that’s the way I look at it.
Tanya: You get the strategy right.
Tanya: Focus on who the consumer is, why they’re buying from us, why they’ve stopped buying from us.
Tanya: We look at the data and that’s what drives all of this.
Tanya: I think I would look at what we’ve done in terms of adopting some of the newer tools out there to make our business easier from an operations point of view.
Tanya: I think we’ve taken up AI quite strongly in terms of managing the content and copy, because that is where we’ve seen that direct impact.
Tanya: Again, five brands, different tonalities, different target customers, communication cues, and this is ongoing, whether it is a product communication, whether it’s a retail offer, whether it is CLM campaign, all those nuances have to be built in.
Tanya: So rather than having an agency sit and do all of these things for us, and in my past experience, again, we’ve seen replication when you have agencies doing all of the content for all of these brands.
Tanya: So AI has helped the team be very independent in that way because they put in the right cues and the right prompts and we get exactly what we want.
Tanya: And it’s super fast.
Tanya: So I think AI has been something that we’ve used quite well and we’re going to continue using.
Tanya: Also working with vendors who can do more intelligent customer segmentation for us.
Tanya: I think a guiding principle in the last few months and a big shift which has happened in the last few months and I think we’ll take that with us in the coming year is that less is more.
Tanya: So we want to be a little bit more elusive, not to bombard consumers.
Tanya: Across communication channels, we are seeing a drop in deliveries.
Tanya: Customers are becoming increasingly tired with the kind of…
Tanya: I mean, there’s so much of stimulation, whether it is social media, whether it is through an SMS or WhatsApp, all of that.
Tanya: So these communication channels, the ones who run it, whether it’s Meta that does it for WhatsApp and Facebook and all of that, they make sure that choice, whether this is spam, not spam, whether they want to be disturbed.
Tanya: So we are seeing that.
Tanya: Consumers have been given that power to decide what is it that they want to see and when they want to receive it and all of that.
Tanya: Which is great from a consumer’s point of view, but from a, me as a consumer, I’m very happy, but then from a business point of view, that’s hard.
Tanya: So we want to look at, if previously you were giving, I mean, sending a customer 10 messages, can those 10 messages become five, for instance, right?
Tanya: But more relevant because of the customer cluster that customer belongs to.
Tanya: But again, very challenging because when it’s a big sale weekend and if the business needs it, then you have to accommodate that.
Tanya: So it’s a fine line to walk, but I think as a guiding principle that less is more, I think that, and that really would only be possible if you have intelligent customer segmentation.
Tanya: So that is something which we want to focus on, already started working on that.
Tanya: Personalization, I love personalization.
Tanya: As a consumer, I would love it, or I love it when brands send me my name spelt correctly, that’s good enough, I’m happy.
Tanya: I don’t need too much more, so we have lots of data and I think brands can go crazy with it.
Tanya: So we try not to get too crazy, just enough.
Tanya: So just enough to give nudges, not too early in the customer acquisition journey as well, the longer they are with us is probably when I’d give a little bit more to them in terms of what we know.
Tanya: But I think personalization is something that we work on, we’re working with vendors who can create these layouts and artworks for us, which are absolutely personalized.
Tanya: So if you have a 100,000 customer database, we create 100,000 creators with the personalization.
Tanya: So it could be name, it could be points, it could be vouchers, it could be a birthday.
Tanya: But I try to make sure that we make, it’s not too much, we don’t want to bombard at the end of the day.
Tanya: It’s just a hey, hi, that sort of thing.
Tanya: But with your name and a few basic data points that we’ve got correct, so personalization.
Tanya: For the future, we’re looking at gamification.
Tanya: That’s something which we’re exploring.
Tanya: Haven’t yet found the right tool, but I think the intent is there.
Tanya: Irrespective of whether it’s a Gen Z consumer, whether it’s a Gen X, I think everybody is very digital.
Tanya: People are looking for some fun and play.
Tanya: That’s something that we would probably adopt in the coming year or so.
Amanda: I think Tanya, just listening to you and answering this last section, you mentioned so many things, but it was like a mini master class in the use of AI for loyalty.
Amanda: I love the way you just said the speed to market, the change of tonality, the change of data fields or the speed of that segmentation analysis for those key data points that drive personalization and keeping it simple.
Amanda: I think everyone is getting themselves in knots and twists about how best to use AI and what it can really do.
Amanda: Just do the basics better, faster.
Amanda: Use it how you need to just enhance what you’re doing and obviously, then future stage to change how you’re doing things.
Amanda: But I love the answer to that.
Amanda: I thought it was really powerful because you break it down into bite-sized chunks that many loyalty professionals will need to hear.
Amanda: They’re very nice.
Amanda: Thank you.
Amanda: To draw our conversation to an end, unfortunately, because I really could keep chatting to you for a lot longer, what if you had a magic wand, would you like to fix or make happen quicker or better in the work that you’re doing?
Tanya: Just one, Amanda.
Tanya: I have a long wish list.
Tanya: But if I had a moonshot, a single moonshot, I think it’s something that we’ve struggled with all these years, is how do you recognize a consumer as soon as he walks into the store?
Tanya: Typically, customer recognition happens at the till desk, at the time of billing.
Tanya: So after he’s made his decision to buy from you.
Tanya: I would love to be able to tell store staff that he is a consumer, he’s a gold member, he loves to buy t-shirts in neutral colors, he’s a size L.
Tanya: We give the information, we don’t want them to hard sell, but they use the information as they see fit in a discerning manner.
Tanya: So I would love to be able to do that.
Tanya: It’s one of the hardest jobs, I think, trying to sell a t-shirt to a consumer.
Tanya: It’s a very humbling experience as well being a salesperson.
Tanya: So if we can give them any sort of information to help them close that sale, I think it will be a game changer for us.
Tanya: From a consumer’s point of view, again, the recognition is happening as soon as they walk into the store and not when they’re pulling out their wallet.
Tanya: So I think that’s something, of course, keeping in mind consumers’ privacy and all of that, it’s not been cracked.
Tanya: I would love to know if there are cases where brands are doing this, but I know in India, this is something that we are yet to figure out.
Tanya: So this is something that I would like instant recognition when they walk in through the door.
Amanda: Beautiful.
Amanda: What a great answer, like personalization in the operational space, not just in communications and so on.
Amanda: I love it.
Amanda: I’m always a big fan of how do we get your actual floor staff, the operations staff really behind the program, because at the end of the day, you’re going to make the real difference.
Tanya: Yes, and empowered to close that deal.
Amanda: Yeah, of course.
Amanda: Tanya, we could talk for a lot longer, but unfortunately, we’re going to run out.
Amanda: We’ve run out of time.
Amanda: So I’m going to make sure your LinkedIn profile is in the show notes.
Amanda: And just want to say thank you.
Amanda: It was a real insight, deep insight into fashion loyalty from such an established brand in an amazing country led by yourself who are clearly extremely experienced.
Amanda: So thank you for the insights.
Amanda: Thank you for sharing.
Amanda: And thank you for coming on Loyalty TV.
Tanya: Thank you, Amanda.
Tanya: Had a lovely time.
Tanya: This was fun.
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