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Time to go beyond the loyalty playbook

The current state of loyalty means it's time to review and redefine what it means to your business than writing your own loyalty playbook for your people and customers.
Go beyond demographics
Whether you are looking to increase satisfaction with your staff or your customers, their behaviour is driven by their intention to meet their conscious and unconscious needs. Demographics (nationality, age, religion) is only part of their story. Consider the purpose of their behaviour. Even negative actions have a positive intention for the person doing it. Connect the behaviour to the unmet need and look at clever ways you can address that need.
When conducting surveys, be sure to ask accurate questions that help you get the level of detail that will be helpful to you. In 2002, Target hired Andre Pole, a statistician, who was, through his analysis, able to identify the 25 products bought by a customer that would indicate she was pregnant. Now a well-documented case study of pre-empting consumer needs, Target were able to recognise a teenage pregnancy before she had told her father.
Focus on goals before solutions
Steve Jobs once famously said: "You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology - not the other way around."
Gimmicks and short-term solutions are not enough to drive long-term satisfaction. Once you have dug deep into the psyche of your target group, create a goal where success means meeting their emotional need and your commercial one.
If you regularly hire new expats from their home country, it often means time out of the office dealing with housing and banking issues. The goal could be to get new residents properly settled within a month, reducing distraction and disruption to their work. Two weeks or even a month in a hotel will not be enough. However, the formation of a volunteer mentor group of long-term expats who live in different neighbourhoods will go much further to help them deal with the challenges of the unfamiliar.
Focus on service
Do you serve your employees and customers, or do they serve you? What lifestyle solutions do you provide to make it easy for them to stay with you?
In Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Labour has a target of 28 per cent of the workforce to be female by 2020. While this is a great opportunity to improve service to female customers, it has been a logistical challenge for private companies to implement. Many have seen an extremely high attrition rate from this new female segment, largely due to workplace conditions.
Research what role your company, service or product plays in the life of your target group, specify your goals and then create additional ways to satisfy their needs.
Be open to experimentation
Experimentation is very different to trial and error. Often a joint responsibility between marketing and R&D department, experimentation is a critical part of the innovation process of larger organisations.
Set aside a budget for testing and follow a controlled testing process with goals and metrics to be able to measure the impact. As with any experiment, run a control. Be focused and specific to what defines success. If your results are unclear, it means you need to clarify your metrics.
The writer is founder and executive and marketing coach, Your Neuro Coach, The Change Associates. Views expressed are her own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy.