Without explicit governance, a transactional NPS program drifts back to whoever has the loudest objection. Best practice uses two specific groups, a Steering Committee and a Process Team, operating in a three-layer model. Here's the membership of each, what they're responsible for, and how the model holds the program steady through executive churn.
Other marketing programs prove causality with control groups — set aside a chunk of customers, expose them to everything except the campaign, measure the gap. With loyalty programs, that's awkward to impossible: how do you exclude your high-value customers from the loyalty program? Here's the case for measuring loyalty program effectiveness despite the control-group problem, and the approaches that work.
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.
