Refer-a-friend programs are everywhere, and the recent Schmitt-Skiera-Van den Boulte paper finally puts hard numbers behind whether they actually pay. The answer is yes: customers from paid referral programs retain longer and contribute more margin than non-referred customers. Here's the data, and what it means for how much to spend on stimulated word-of-mouth.
Australian general insurance is a brutal price war with new overseas online entrants undercutting on premium. The Buzz Insurance, IAG-backed, went the other way: co-created their loyalty program with thousands of customers via focus groups, market research and the My Insurance Ideas community. Here's what they built, and why customers responded to a loyalty program that wasn't dressed up as a discount.
Should customer loyalty management be a separate team or distributed across the business? Plenty of organisations get stuck on the question, and stuck means nothing changes. Here's a best-practice structure that works in real organisations, starting with C-level commitment and ending with operations owning operations, not loyalty owning operations.
CFOs like profitability numbers; customer experience leaders speak in soft benefits. The gap is why so many CX proposals never get funded. Return on Customer Investment is the business approach that bridges that gap, turning satisfaction, retention and education investments into hard ROI numbers a CFO can take to the board.
Customer service has shifted from a nice-to-have to a core deliverable in the past decade. Most organisations have the intent, they just haven't lined up the enablers that turn intent into consistent delivery. Here are the seven, and the one most teams quietly skip.
Hotels are scanning Twitter for complaints from guests in their own building, then quietly upgrading the loudest ones. It's clever, and it might also be teaching customers exactly the wrong lesson about how to get good service. Here's where reactive social-media service crosses from helpful into perverse.