Toni Sekinah: What does winning the Customer/CRM Success award mean to you and your team?
Go Inspire: We are immensely proud of how the Go Inspire Insight team and Pets at Home work together. We truly are partners and we all work extremely hard to get to this point consistently. This is lovely recognition for all that hard work.
TS: What advice would you give to other organisations aiming to implement a successful loyalty programme?
GI: We could write a book on this.
Be true to your values – do not offer something you can’t commit to.
Be clear on the proposition for the customers and ensure they get regular value, whether that value is offers, special events, recognition and treats, and so on.
Ensure all levels of the business are behind it. Do not go for a technical solution for the sake of it. Get your Single Customer View database right – this is critical. Get this wrong and you’ll go nowhere fast. It’s not as easy as buying “out of the box” – the nuances of deduplication takes years to experience, and we’re still coming across different scenarios after 20 years.
Always test in pilot mode, and then after full launch, and continually trial new ideas and offers and keep control groups to measure so you can prove the effect.
Be inquisitive and always do analysis to keep your finger on the pulse on customer spend patterns and hunt down anything that looks unusual. You may well find someone else has made a pricing/ranging decision that was not communicated that has had an unexpected effect on certain customers.
And finally, don’t be afraid of failure; there is no such thing. Even setbacks give you valuable information to improve. The only failure is to ignore the evidence of analysis.
T S: Where did the idea come from to enable customers to donate the cash value of points to charity?
GI: That was all Pets at Home. This bit of genius was already decided on before we were bought in pre-launch. I have never seen a charity angle be welded into the spirit of the business, the programme and the customers so successfully. No other programme comes close in our view.
TS: How does your team harmonise physical loyalty cards and pack with the app?
GI: That is where the single customer view comes in. It is one of the core strengths as it is not as easy as it sounds. Our ability to blend the online and offline customer data is what makes our SCV database truly special.
TS: Can you give an example of how a direct mail pack or app is personalised according to a customer’s data points?
GI: As the main mail packs are digitally printed, we have complete flexibility to change images, offers, colours and text to truly hone the pack. For one pack, we create 148,000 different variations based on customers details such as age, Go Inspire Insight’s own unique segmentation, pet ownership, what products they could or do buy and a host of other factors.
TS: How easy is it to curate and manage a membership group?
GI: Conceptually it is pretty straight forward if you know how and you have the SCV database set up correctly to allow you to get to all the insight and nuances. And that’s the rub.
You need three things. The vision and the passion for what you want the programme to be, the knowledge to build and run all the operational elements and the creative spark to turn the vision and insight into a truly stunning, customer contact strategy.
