{"id":5165,"date":"2021-01-05T07:07:42","date_gmt":"2021-01-05T06:07:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/?p=5165"},"modified":"2021-01-05T07:08:30","modified_gmt":"2021-01-05T06:08:30","slug":"2021-the-year-when-loyalty-programs-make-the-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/2021-the-year-when-loyalty-programs-make-the-difference\/","title":{"rendered":"2021: The year when loyalty programs make the difference"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

05 January 2021<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While many travel loyalty programs allowed themselves getting involved in secondary battlefields like monetizing their currency in the past, 2021 will be the year to come back to the roots and to prove that they are actually able to create loyalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I don’t\nknow what your resolutions for the New Year were, but I admit that I don’t\nstart off too well: I am stealing. I am stealing a quote from one of my network\nconnections. Because I like it and because it has a deeper relevance for the\nloyalty business, although it must have been pronounced a few decades before\nthe birth of traditional loyalty programs as we know (and love) them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mahatma Gandhi said: \u201cThe future depends on what we do in the\npresent\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I said before, loyalty is, by definition, something that takes place\nin the future, but which is directly related to our actions today. Or, if you\nturn it the other way round, the loyalty we are getting from clients today is\nthe result of our actions in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, nobody could predict what happened to the industry last year\nand from what we’ll need to recover now. And we need the loyalty of our\ncustomers in order to be able to succeed, whereby most companies would look at\na mix of former and new customers to achieve that. There is wide consensus in\nthe industry about the important responsibility loyalty programs have to assume\nthis year. Given the suddenly changed conditions, there is no other choice than\nbuilding on our actions in the past. Many customers pushed the pause button at\nthe end of the glory times in 2019 and have kept that impression of your\nprogram in mind, in absence of any meaningful interaction since then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While many programs probably wish to be able to revert what they did in\nthe past, this is not possible. Whether they played games with their clients by\nmaking the programs less attractive and\/or more opaque, whether they solely\nlooked at monetizing their loyalty currency, whether they have never learned to\nexploit the data properly, whether they didn’t treat their customers in a fair\nmanner during the crisis (e.g. by not suspending the mileage expiration) – all\nthis will now, in the moment of truth, fire back on them. This is a process,\nwhich has actually already started since many of these programs are becoming\nless relevant in the decision process of customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the near future, the biggest ones won’t necessarily be the most\nsuccessful ones anymore, but those understanding what loyalty really is. Watch\nout to see programs strive, which were never in the headlines in the past since\nthey didn’t engage in headline-grabbing activities such as spin-offs etc., but were\nonly involved in the (boring) work to build loyalty, to use data at their\ndisposal and to embed loyalty to a wider corporate customer experience\nstrategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you belong to those programs feeling that you’ve missed a trick in\nthe past, it is, of course, not too late to change course. But you can only\nensure that your own future in the medium term will look better, but not change\nthat you are at a competitive disadvantage in the short run, requiring you to\ndo even more efforts in order to stay relevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one thing we should all have learned from last year is that\nunpredictable things, at big or small scale, can happen at any moment. We\nshould therefore always keep such possibility in mind with everything we do\nwithin our spheres of influence. Relationships – and loyalty is only about that\n– are always a mix of giving and taking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The temptation is big to think in good times that there might be less\nneed for giving (and indeed, there is less need in that specific moment!). But\nit is not a sound preparation for the moments when the wind turns. And those\nmoments will inevitably come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The future depends on what we do in the present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

05 January 2021 While many travel loyalty programs allowed themselves getting involved in secondary battlefields like monetizing their currency in the past, 2021 will be the year to come back to the roots and to prove that they are actually able to create loyalty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5165"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5166,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5165\/revisions\/5166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/french\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}