{"id":5103,"date":"2020-08-24T08:38:52","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T07:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/?p=5103"},"modified":"2020-08-24T08:39:32","modified_gmt":"2020-08-24T07:39:32","slug":"the-art-of-listening-to-customers-and-its-alternative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/the-art-of-listening-to-customers-and-its-alternative\/","title":{"rendered":"The art of listening to customers (and its alternative)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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24 August 2020<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listening to customers is an art for itself. While many loyalty programs incorporate such strategy to define future features, most fail to interpret correctly what they hear and\/or to translate this into the appropriate action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

It is\ntypically programs announcing devaluations in their loyalty programs, which start\ntheir message with „based on customer feedback“. Any seasoned\nfrequent traveller understands immediately that no good news is going to\nfollow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cynics\nmight say that these programs have even not consulted any customers at all, but\nthat actually might not be the case. Working with customer focus groups is\ncommon practice in the industry these days and this approach has indeed its\ncharm – if applied properly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there\nare actually several issues to this approach. In most cases, programs either\nask the right questions to the wrong audience or the wrong questions to the\nright audience. Too often, programs have predefined the answers they want to\nhear and adjust their questions accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last\nexample is probably Air Canada, proudly claiming that they’ve listened to\nthousands of customers when designing the new Aeroplan program, taking this\nlistening-to-customers exercise probably to completely new heights, unheard of\nuntil now. While the program has indeed come up with some interesting new\nfeatures, the qualification rules for the tier program remained virtually the\nsame. A bit unsurprisingly, since this recognition part of the program was\nalready managed by Air Canada itself before. Obviously, it is easier to\nquestion aspects of the program somebody else had designed than what they had\ndone themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the\nmanagement was challenged with the question why they didn’t change anything\nwith that part of the program, the answer was that there was no need since\ninterviewed customers expressed their satisfaction with the status quo. Logical?\nOnly at very first sight and a nice example how listening to customers may lead\nto wrong results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The simple\nmistake Air Canada did here is that they apparently asked customers, for\nwhom the current system works<\/em>. The right question to the wrong audience. There\nwas no need for them to desire any changes. Either any changed rules would make\nthe qualification more difficult for them or they would lead to more elite\nmembers fighting for the same capacity-limited benefits, such as complimentary\nupgrades. Indeed, neither of these two scenarios is desirable for existing\nelite members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if they\nhad asked any non-elite members or elite members of competing programs, they\nwould definitely have got a very different feedback and be faced with a much\nmore challenging task, to weight the satisfaction of the current members against\nthe opportunities to generate more business by adopting changes (and admitting\nthat they didn’t get things right in the past).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other\nunderlying issue is that customers would not necessarily pounder any replies\nfrom a business perspective, but in a more opportunistic manner, hoping to\nachieve results, which they basically know that they are not realistic. It\ndoesn’t cost to ask for more – but if they don’t get it, will they really\nchange their purchase behaviour? Or more importantly, if they get it (at\nadditional expenses for the program), will they really shift more business to\nyou? Ultimately, all comes down to such questions and that is, where a lot of\nhypotheses are required, without any clear right or wrong decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While there\nare clear benefits of listening to customers on the paper, it is my experience\nthat hardly anybody really masters that art in the context of loyalty programs.\nWe usually don’t recommend putting too many efforts on this, especially since\nthere is a very attractive and more scientific alternative: the performance\nmeasurement of your program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any program\ndevelopments should indeed take the customer perception at least into\nconsideration, next to any internal considerations. But the best way to\nunderstand where your program fails and has weaknesses that need to be\naddressed is to look at its real performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The data of\na loyalty program is like its soul, opening up the full truth about it. As an\nexample, customers would certainly claim in a qualitative manner that they are\nnot happy with any too harsh expiry policies. But only data really shows you\nhow much your program is suffering from it quantitatively and how much more\nbusiness you might be able to hope to generate when loosening such rule. It\nthen becomes a simple cost-benefit calculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The richer\nthe program proposition, the more insightful data you can generate, allowing\nyou really to understand all the ins and outs of your program, especially if\nyou are able to apply some industry benchmark. This is not only more reliable\nthan asking customers, but also a much quicker and cheaper exercise since all\nthe required information is constantly at your fingertips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only\nremaining challenge is to be self-critical enough to assess the data honestly\nrather than hiding the truth. And that is where customer feedback and data\nmight come together again: they represent a mirror, which sometimes is hard to\naccept. You need to be strong enough to look at the whole picture of truth in\nthe mirror rather than at a small corner only. But the data approach definitely\nleaves less room for interpretation and errors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And any\nfuture program changes will quickly turn into „based on customer\nacceptation“.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 August 2020 Listening to customers is an art for itself. While many loyalty programs incorporate such strategy to define future features, most fail to interpret correctly what they hear and\/or to translate this into the appropriate action.<\/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\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5103"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5104,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5103\/revisions\/5104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalflight.net\/german\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}