Fusion Analytics teams up with Coniak to give businesses better loyalty programme reporting

A recent article in the Drum reported ‘the right loyalty programme can work wonders for a business. It encourages recency, frequency and value of purchase. It defends against the competition by offering a differentiating reason to prefer. It’s a way to reward valued customers with a stake in the success of the company by sharing upside. It’s able to affiliate customers closer to the brand. But good loyalty programmes are more the exception than the rule, and the wrong loyalty strategy can do serious damage to your brand.’

 

A common flaw of loyalty programmes

Loyalty programmes never intentionally select the wrong strategy.  In our experience the wrong strategy comes about because those involved don’t have access to the right insight to support strategic and day-to-day decisions needed for the programme

This is because in most organisations, management information reporting develops organically and generally at a pace that fails to keep up with the new and evolving demands placed on key decision-makers.

The current suite of reports available to provide the insight-base for optimal decisions is often out-of-date, incomplete, difficult to interpret, lacks inference or narrative and is not conducive to action.  With customer behaviour and involvement in loyalty programmes often changing quickly in its nature, plus the increasing and different channels customers interact with as part of their customer journey, it’s easy to see that a report set up a few years back could give misleading information.

 

The importance of accurate reporting for different stakeholders

Another challenge is that reports have seldom been designed to capture the specific information needs of individual stakeholders. As such, they fail to capture some of the key metrics which will spark new strategic ideas, or diagnose (at-a-glance) issues and opportunities concerning the way a loyalty programme is running and performing.

They are usually not bespoke, often with all stakeholders receiving almost everything rather than just those pieces of information they need to support their role.

Fusion Analytics and Coniak have therefore teamed up to create a solution which puts all of this right within a short consultancy engagement.  The outcome being to deliver significantly better-informed and effective planning and operational decisions for businesses running loyalty programmes.

 

Gaining clarity for loyalty programme decision-making and effectiveness

The collaboration ensures businesses will at last gain bespoke and essential reporting which they need to judge and improve the effectiveness of their loyalty programmes and loyalty databases.

The short consultancy project typically takes place over a 6 week period and includes the following outputs:

• A comprehensive review of the organisation’s data across all sources and current reports
• Identification through interviews of the organisation’s reporting requirements and the needs of stakeholders in evaluating loyalty-programme performance and decision-making
• The creation and implementation of new report templates which meet all the documented needs, where each stakeholder receives only those reports relevant and necessary to support their role so none of their time is wasted. The templates are designed to also present snapshots, month-on-month comparisons, year-on-year comparisons and trends. They will relate to the overall and segmented customer populations of the organisation.

 

Expert knowledge and a practical application

Commenting on the collaboration, Fusion Analytics’ MD – Howard Thompson – said,

“We are really delighted to team up with Coniak to bring this key support to the loyalty programme market.  Over the years we have seen many organisations struggle to gain the meaningful insights they need to evaluate and improve their loyalty programmes.  It is great to have the opportunity to work with Brian Birkhead at Coniak.  He has over 20 years’ experience as a marketing and analytics expert in the Retail and Financial Services sector. He truly understands the challenges of loyalty programmes and has supported many National and International Retail and Financial Services brands. A testimony of his expertise was when he won the IPA’s 5 star award and his awards from the Marketing Society of Great Britain for excellence in CRM.”

Brian Birkhead – MD at Coniak – added, “The Fusion Analytics team are the ideal partners for this collaboration.  Howard and his consultants are experts in so many data systems, statistics, modelling and big data applications. They have a proven track-record in helping companies better understand their customers by accurately analysing interactions and behaviour. Their analytical work helps those organisations increase customer value and business profitability.”

 

For more information

If you feel your loyalty programme, database or data is not giving you the right management information you need, contact the Fusion Analytics team on 0203 287 5387 or email info@fusion-analytics.co.uk