Measuring Shopper Loyalty - emerging dimensions
Imagine this...A family of four walks in to your lifestyle apparel & accessories store...shop a few brands, a few of your labels, swipe their cards (bank card + your shopper card) & walk-off. Sure your store associate would have made it a nice shopping experience for the family, and sure your shopper loyalty card would have captured this transaction & accrued points.
Zoom into the future - a day later, the father of the family tweets about 'a nice shopping experience over the weekend, at xyz'; and the girl child of the family writes about her new shoes in facebook, uploads a picture, and 'Likes' your brand: and 10 of her friends like it, enquire the place of buy and 2 of them land-up at your store the next weekend...how does such behavior get treated in your loyalty program today?
Traditional loyalty programs based on transactional behavior needs a rethink to prepare for the near future (or probably even for today!), given the data environment around businesses is now growing ever so big. Using only trips, basket sizes & values as measures of loyalty is sure to bias the program in favor of customers that have a bigger household size (given a base level of activity).
In the above example, the family may be a much smaller household compared to 'AVG_HHOLD_SIZE'! of customers in your database. However, such experience sharing may probably put them at the top league of your loyal customers. So, what data are the dimensions of customer behavior that become relevant to measure loyalty?
Measuring all these dimensions and tagging that to specific customers / households (especially social media influencing behavior of the primary & members of the household) will represent a technical challenge. Also relevant is to keep in mind how much shoppers would like to open up their social media behavior for loyalty marketing activities (my assumption is that it depends on how aspirational + trustworthy the brand is as perceived by the shopper)
However, starting to think about these will become essential to differentiate by enhancing the shopper experience even further.
