Using personalization to drive customer loyalty

A major retailer was about to redesign its underperforming rewards program. But instead of tweaking the program benefits or marketing, they came to Amplify with the challenge to overhaul how they think about customer loyalty.

The brand knew that their existing program encouraged customers to “earn and burn” points and rewards - transactional loyalty that didn’t drive retention. They wanted the new program to develop lasting emotional loyalty and deepen the customer’s relationship with the brand over time.

The retailer had also invested heavily in personalization capabilities in their digital products, and asked Amplify to help define the connection between personalization, engagement, and loyalty in the customer experience.

Amplify set out to create a vision for how the brand could develop true loyalty and brand love over the entire customer lifecycle - through digital and in store interactions that created a conversation between the brand and customers, and by delivering personalized customer experiences that showed individual appreciation and care.

In particular, our goal was to design emotional and financial “reward loops” throughout the journey that both encourage habit formation and reinforce why customers are loyal to the brand in the first place.

‍

Amplify designed and simulated a high fidelity future customer experience based on deep personalization and led 15 customers around the country through a week-long immersion study, including daily digital and in person experiences with the future loyalty program.

What was unique about this study was that all the tough points in this study were hyper-personalized with real customer data. Participants saw themselves and their style reflected in the retailer’s app, they got real product recommendations based on their needs, and got uniquely personalized experiences while shopping in store. 

Amplify researchers were able to mock up personalized moments with real data in real time and deliver delightful personalization through a smoke and mirrors approach that allowed customers to really experience the future program and give thoughtful feedback and insights. 

Our research generated the critical insight that proactively asking customers to participate in personalization and showing clear changes with their input were powerful drivers of emotional loyalty and brand love. We showed that personalized experiences that help customers meet their goals - and not transactional rewards  - were what drove behavior and lasting loyalty. 

This project generated two foundational elements that the retailer used to design the customer experience:

• A customer journey showing the key moments to develop a relationship with customers, create repeatable habits, and reinforce loyalty through personalized experiences that show appreciation.
• An experience framework that can be used to design personalized experiences, including demonstrating how to ask for data from customers and show how that information is used to improve their experience.

‍