#152: Expert Insights from a Loyalty Leader in India (Short Summary Show)

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

This episode is brought to you by Epsilon and their award-winning PeopleCloud loyalty solution.

Personalization should be integrated into the entire customer experience, including of course your loyalty program.

With this in mind, Epsilon recently released a guide outlining six key components that will put you on the path to personalizing your entire loyalty experience. This guide challenges you to do some housekeeping and reconsider how you think about your current and future loyalty personalization efforts.

So to download your copy of the report, visit epsilon.com/letstalkloyalty.

Welcome to episode 1 52 of “Let’s Talk Loyalty”

Today, I’m sharing with you a summary of my conversation with a leading loyalty expert, who is based in new Delhi in India, Kunal Moihuddin, a colleague of mine from the customer strategy network, and he has over 20 years experience in loyalty marketing, including founding one of the top loyalty technology companies in India called net carrots, as well as co-founding another one called loyalty prime.

We started as usual by discussing a favorite loyalty statistic, which for canal is a twist on the well-known model of, or FM or recency frequency and monetary value, having designed and built some multibrand and multicultural GRI programs, Kanal shared that he learned the importance of variety, which essentially means when members of a program engage across more than one brand or casual gree. He calls it variety. So his model has evolved to become or F M V or what many of us know as cross sell for the multibrand programs that Cornell was leading. They were able to identify that customers who engage with two brands in a program rather than just one spent at least 32% more and members who interacted with at least three brands spent 78% more. So it really confirms there is definitely enormous value in focusing on cross sell opportunities. If you haven’t done so already with your program, I then asked Kanal to share his favorite loyalty programs around the world and of the ones he shared. My favorite was one in a very unexpected sector, the construction industry, and a B2B loyalty program that he and his colleagues launched for a cement manufacturing firm, which canal had worked on about 12 years earlier. Now, while this isn’t an industry that many of us typically work in canal’s client company shared the same characteristics of companies for whom loyalty mechanics are most powerful. For example, it was operating in a highly commoditized business with competing manufacturers, simply offering cash incentives to retailers Kunal, and his colleagues instead created a clear profile of their audience. And then they mapped out the important times in their lives when they could support them. The focus was then four key areas, which they summarized as me, my family, my business, and my community with these needs in mind, they created a catalog of benefits across all of them. Some of the great insights included the importance of the retailers family in particular, they noticed that often it was the retailer’s wife who chose and enjoyed the retailers rewards. So they made sure that the reward catalog had plenty of options for women, even though the majority of members in this B2B program for cement retailers were in fact themselves men. He also shared some exciting results when the program launched specific goals to persuade the retailers, to use electronic payments and allow the firm to eliminate the need, to accept either cash or check payments, which were the usual pay to pay in India at the time using their B2B loyalty program. The use of electronic payments multiplied from about 20% of transactions to over 95% of transactions. So this whole loyalty program became a fascinating internal case study for this international firm around the world. In the full interview canal also shares the secrets to how the program was communicated to members, given how huge a country India is. And particularly at the time when their database of email addresses was just 3% of their membership of retailers, finally, in our discussion of loyalty leavers, Kanal shared his version of the Paraiso principle and the principles he believes are important to focus on with those customers. The, we all know we never want to lose rather than the basic recognition and reward approach of the past canal. And his colleagues created a framework called the three E’s, which includes benefits that are economic, emotional, and also support the members eco. He also shared examples of these such as the power of creating a scholarship fund for members to be able to educate their children a highly emotional benefit, which can truly change many lives. So I, for one loved that concept with two decades of loyalty marketing experience behind him, Kunal has now started focusing on the role of AI or artificial intelligence and delighting customers. And again, he gave some fascinating use cases of how this technology is already working in the world, as well as sharing some ideas that he himself was working on last year to begin to use this innovative functionality in practice. So that’s it from this episode of let’s talk a little loyalty. If you’d like to hear more from Kunal MOU Dean head on over to let’s talk loyalty for the full interview it’s episode number 45 and definitely 40 minutes of your time. Well-spent and of course, please do join me again this Thursday for only my second ever interview from New Zealand where I’m chatting with Phil Devlin from countdown, a leading grocery retailer who shares some exciting insights on this mature competitive market, which is perhaps the most highly engaged loyalty market in the world. This show is sponsored by the wise market here. The world’s most popular source of loyalty marketing news insights and research. The wise marketeer also offers loyalty marketing training through its loyalty academy, which has already certified over 170 executives in 20 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals. For more information, check out the wise market tier.com and loyalty academy.org. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of let’s talk loyalty. If you’d like me to send you the latest show each week, simply sign up for the show newsletter on let’s talk loyalty.com and I’ll send you the latest episode to your inbox every Thursday, or just head to your favorite podcast platform. Find let’s talk loyalty and subscribe. Of course I’d love your feedback and reviews. And thanks again for supporting the show.