Motivforce recently undertook a study looking at the most appropriate and effective way to respond to a B2B Loyalty Program participant’s feedback – particularly in the social media environment but with direct implications to contained environments. The results revealed that the most effective response is when help desk employees put themselves in the shoes of the customer before they respond.

Business Partner Loyalty. 10 questions you need to consider.

Think of yourself and your company as a Sherpa and the role you play when it comes to ensuring your business partners achieve their goals:

• Are you prepared to help your partners navigate through challenging business conditions?
• Do you understand their strengths and weaknesses?

How do we attract members to our loyalty program without having to invest hugely? How do we boost the business from acquired members that justifies the generous spend on those mid-tier members in our program? These are questions that keep C-suite executives awake at night. At Motivforce R&D we are introducing a new approach that we call loyalty hacking. What’s with the hacking you may ask?......

Most companies have come to realise that offering online education modules continues to be an important driving force in establishing successful channel partner relationships. At Motivforce R&D, we often are asked to come up with a convincing business case that outlines how clients will start earning by learning, simply by making the switch to online enablement. These are the four key benefits on which we think such a case can be built:

Most loyalty marketers focus on rewarding customer or business partner behaviour. Yet, there is another important side to the loyalty coin and that is recognizing the performance of employees. There is a so-called profit chain that links employee motivation and behaviour with customer loyalty. We have witnessed an important shift when it comes to employee recognition programs; the focus is no longer on incentivizing individual employees, but on rewarding the performance of teams. 

When Leicester City won the Premiership, at the Etihad, Manchester City’s home ground, fans stayed to applaud Leicester players and manager off the pitch, despite the fact that they had just humiliated their team. This is in line with recent research that shows that single-brand loyalty is rapidly eroding in favour of multiple brand loyalty. Customers often partially defect and as a result there may be a much higher ROI in trying to increase customers’ share of spending with your brand instead of trying to maximize customer retention intentions. Brand loyalty is a team sport!

The Pokémon Go craze, which is based on a killer app that has got millions of people leaving their computer screens. Responding to Nintendo’s call to action to 'catch Pokémon in the real world...' Strange as it may seem, there is a very, very important lesson for your loyalty program.

Our loyalty professors Ko de Ruyter and Debbie Keeling share their latest research and how to avoid channel partners having mixed feelings about your loyalty program. How does this impact program ROI and what can you do about it? 

Recently one of our clients came up with the idea of running a bundle promotion.
Bundle promotions are commonly seen in our B2B loyalty space and the concept is well accepted by customers.
However, here we need to pause and remind ourselves of the purpose of running a promotion. 

A loyalty and incentive company has to behave like a doctor – it has to diagnose the problem before implementing the cure. One common mistake that companies make is, instead of making a personal diagnosis, they just copy what their competitors are doing To avoid these mistakes...

The concept of Social Loyalty has been growing over the last five years, but we predict that 2016 is the year when it will truly take off in terms of our clients. Social media is one of the most absorbing tasks that individuals undertake on a daily basis. Indeed for Millennials, their life is built around their social media habits. Thus savvy program designers are looking to leverage this existing infrastructure to drive their own programs.

Clients often point out that many loyalty program members cheat and that making compliance rules stricter hardly seems to have any effect. It’s not like they’re all bad apples, it’s just that a lot of members seem to curb honesty, here, there and everywhere.

At Motivforce R&D we are all doctors. Not the kind you turn to when somebody on a flight is having a heart attack (although we do get asked sometimes!). We are pretty useless at saving people. We probably could tell you though what the impact of such an incident would be on passenger satisfaction or how it affects the airline’s brand equity. This is useful when you work for a loyalty marketing company.

In order to find answers, let’s take a look at some more facts. When customers voice their discontent socially, they share a story about a personal experience. It’s often a tale from the heart, it’s not a professionally edited PR statement, and its tone of voice is authentic, unpolished, raw even.

Some of us at Motivforce have been avid Star Trek fans since our early years. Mind you, not the super nerdy types who glue on pointed ears and pretend to chat via chest-fitted communicators at conventions. Nerdy enough though, to sometimes use the show as a frame of reference when confronted with the realities of work life.

At a Motivforce event held in Sydney, Australia, co-director of Motivforce R&D, Professor Ko de Ruyter presented research on how to best cultivate an engaged social community and focussed on: marketing strategy, customer relationship management, social media and customer loyalty. He used popular culture icon Lady Gaga as an ongoing example throughout his presentation. 

This article was originally posted on crn.com.au