Dive into the intricacies of loyalty and incentive marketing, and discover the importance of personalised strategies, analytics, and the evolving nature of loyalty programs.

Most loyalty marketers focus on rewarding customer or business partner behaviour. Yet, there is another important side to the loyalty coin and that is recognizing the performance of employees. There is a so-called profit chain that links employee motivation and behaviour with customer loyalty. We have witnessed an important shift when it comes to employee recognition programs; the focus is no longer on incentivizing individual employees, but on rewarding the performance of teams. 

In designing employee recognition programs, it is imperative to be very specific about the kind of behaviours that you want your associates to display (and get rewarded for). Many of our clients make the mistake of relating their incentives to broad and generic corporate values. Instead, the specs are important, as they make for easier and more transparent reward criteria. Also, do consider recognizing your operational managers. For many customer-facing employees, their supervisor, team leader or store manager is a role model who they look to for guidance on good practice. 

A loyalty and incentive company has to behave like a doctor – it has to diagnose the problem before implementing the cure. One common mistake that companies make is, instead of making a personal diagnosis, they just copy what their competitors are doing To avoid these mistakes...