Bryan Pearson

How to Distinguish the Customer Experience

It is a fact taken for granted that, in most cases, today’s great customer  experience actually began months ago, with a few key insights.

For many of us, the customer experience is distilled in a single moment ¬– when the consumer is in your store, interacting with your sales associates, surfing your Web site, or whenever else you come into direct contact. But this final act is, as we all know, the culmination of hours of hours of work – understanding our customers and what they value, delivering products and services that appeal to them, training our staff to deliver in a way that resonates, and so on.

But none of this can come to pass – not in way that is effective – without a keen focus on customer information. Data is the raw material of today’s marketing industry, and there is no shortage. But there are shortcomings, particularly in...

Imagine if Shell, Kroger, Macy’s, Delta Air Lines, Visa and CVS joined to form a loyalty rewards program Dream Team, one that allowed consumers to accumulate and redeem thousands of points on purchases of gas, groceries, apparel, travel and drugs – at any of the participating merchants they chose.

This kind of universal, or “coalition,” loyalty program is available and quite popular in many countries, including neighboring Canada, but not in the United States. The U.S. market is dominated instead by what’s known in the industry as the single-operator loyalty program.

Why? Around the world, coalition programs thrive with memberships approaching 1 billion, according to estimates by Finaccord,...

When it comes to winning consumer loyalty, some merchants are learning there are times when it makes sense to phone it in.

Take the case of SuperValu, parent company of the Albertsons, Cub Foods and Jewel-Osco chains. SuperValu recently launched a company-wide mobile app, which does many of the things a shopper would expect – it finds nearby retail locations, allows shoppers to view the weekly circular and helps them manage their shopping list.

But this app goes a yard further in making the harried consumer’s life easier in that it is available across all of SuperValu’s nine retail brand websites. This enables it to aggregate all its weekly ads in one place, so shoppers seeking local deals can find...

Oh, what a tangled dilemma marketers face today.

After years of financial stress, demand for marketing accountability has not let up in the least, putting loyalty marketers under immediate pressure to produce results, or face the consequences.

I first wrote about this dilemma two years ago and I realize that not much has changed. In fact, my old article still holds up.

Generally, companies still find themselves with loads of data but not enough action. Now, as then, a partnership is needed between the marketing and finance departments to link customer performance measures with revenue, sales and cost measures.

This...