Strip away the CRM jargon and customer loyalty management comes down to two things — listening to customers and remembering what they told you. That sounds trivial. The Reichheld research on why most companies still fail at it isn't. Here's what to actually remember, and why it matters more than the tooling.
Customer loyalty programs need regular check-ups the same way an exotic sports car does — both are temperamental and both quietly stop running well long before they fail spectacularly. Here are five quick checks to run on your loyalty program now, from "is it still mechanically sound" to the one that matters most: is it still fun to be in?
Charity donations, magazine subscriptions, event re-attendance, mail-order purchases — non-contract, discrete-transaction relationships are everywhere, and the standard CLV formula doesn't fit them well. Here's the Fader-Hardie model for that quadrant translated into actionable steps, with the data you need and how to use the resulting customer-value forecasts.
Fader and Hardie's CLV models are well known in marketing academia and largely ignored in marketing practice — partly because the source papers are dense, partly because nobody distils the actionable steps. Here they are for retail and other non-contract continuous-purchase customer bases — what data you need, the assumptions to check, and how to use the results.
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.
Most teams stall on retention waiting for cleaner data or better segmentation. The Aberdeen research is blunt: best-in-class companies do more and analyse less. Here's the case for acting on the data you already have, and why "our data isn't good enough" is usually a stalling tactic.