This emotional connection between the customer and the company and its brands and products plays a crucial role. Today, companies need to be vigilant about listening to their customers’ emotions. Indeed, the experience companies develop for such journeys is a highly effective way to get people to smile. How can we do this, though? This blog post discusses why businesses need to invest in loyalty and gamification. These ideas were introduced during a masterclass before the AS Watson European Hackathon 2024 in Amsterdam in April. With support from partners like Microsoft and SAP, EPAM presented five masterclasses of data science, computer science, and business students as a launchpad for their next challenge during the conference: Create the Future of Retail Loyalty Programs. Let’s look closer at these ideas and what they presented.
Customer Loyalty: Ensure Business Sucess with Personalized Experiences
Loyalty keeps a brand at the top of customers' minds and should drive business. Building loyalty isn’t easy, and every consumer has different expectations and engagement cues. In our rapidly evolving digital world, brands that prioritise the customer and provide a curated, relevant, and meaningful experience in all of their offline and online interactions will be winners.
Data is critical to creating personalised experiences that make customers loyal. However, now that third-party data is limited, companies must innovate ways to access and utilise first-party data. By doing this, brands can also gain insights into customers, which allows for greater personalisation and loyalty programs.
One successful personalisation example is AS Watson’s O+O (Offline Plus Online) e-commerce initiative. This approach combines the offline and digital journey to serve customers better with digital transformation. It allows them to shop at any location, channel, or time. It draws upon customer insights with help from cutting-edge technologies, big data, and AI. The loyalty program plays a pivotal role in this O+O ecosystem, uniting the O+O customer journey and driving customer emotional journeys. What was the goal? Get people smiling today and tomorrow.
Andrea Zoboli, AS Watson’s eLab Technology Director for Europe, says: “At AS Watson, we recognise the immense value of engaging customers across all touchpoints, which is why we've placed our O+O strategy at the core of our approach. Central to this strategy is our flexible tech infrastructure, which seamlessly integrates our O+O platforms. This integration allows us to deliver tailored experiences at every touchpoint, leveraging technology to personalise interactions and meet evolving customer needs. Our tech-driven approach ensures we remain agile and responsive as loyalty dynamics continue to evolve, especially with emerging generations. Through initiatives like our recent hackathon centred on 'Next Gen Loyalty,' we're dedicated to leveraging technology to anticipate and adapt to changing preferences and behaviours. Our ultimate goal? To consistently fulfil our mission: to put a smile on our customers' faces today and tomorrow!’’
Successful loyalty programmes need technology. It’s crucial technology to create value, be omnichannel, customisable, and evolve constantly. Future loyalty schemes must be more adaptable because technology must accommodate them. This modular design makes adding or removing features easy, allowing quick updates and generating new loyalty program versions as customer demand and desire change, giving more bespoke experiences.
Renewing the Shopping Experience with the Power of Gamification
Retail presents an innovative new platform for developing gamified experiences to drive customer engagement, build relationships, and drive conversion. Gamification appeals to the human need for competition and achievement by providing consumers with gratifying experiences that establish long-term bonds with brands. According to Mordor Intelligence, the gamification market can scale to $48.7 billion in 2029.
Gamification makes the entire buying experience a game where customers can progress or “level up”, resulting in a deeper and more satisfying relationship with the brand.
This strategy works especially well for Gen Z and Generation Alpha, who both strongly desire immersive experiences when purchasing. Using imagination and the creative application of AR and VR technology, brands can offer customised, tailored, and interactive experiences that increase customer acquisition and retention. Gamification builds emotional loyalty, which can make for a sustainable brand-customer relationship.
In Conclusion
Loyalty programs combined with gamification will generate a new generation of customer engagement and revenue creation. Innovative and adaptable technology facilitates this combination, supercharging legacy loyalty schemes with gamification's playful and thrilling potential. It enhances the customer’s buying journey and opens the road to higher emotional loyalty.
If distilled into an online-offline approach, this combination allows greater personalisation and emotional connection with customers, increasing engagement and retention. The technology will enable brands to use gamification even more effectively to build hyper-personalized experiences of much greater depth than before, which can make a tremendous difference to the omnichannel retail experience.
Finally, staying in touch with youth and being creative to unlock loyalty is extremely important for brands. AS Watson’s Hackathon is an example of an initiative that significantly taps into this audience, Gen Z, which is predicted to be essential for retail’s future.