COLLOQUY Corner: You’re Only As Strong As Your Staff
Training is key to the successful launch of any loyalty program. Your employees, after all, are the front-line ambassadors for your loyalty program. As a marketer focused on the big picture of customer retention and loyalty, you might think it pointless or even counterproductive to spend time educating your staff and seeking their input on your strategy. But unless you plan on manning the counter or the customer service line yourself, you’re going to need their buy-in to succeed. Here are a few tips for training and empowering your front-line employees.
Involve employees in the design
You should seek the help of your employees in the design of your loyalty strategy. Your store-level managers, in particular, will have valuable suggestions about what customers do and don’t like. Will your customers take the time to register for a program on-site, or do they just want to grab their purchases and run? What services and amenities are customers asking for that you don’t provide? What local partner tie-ins can you include in your reward catalog that will get your members excited? Only your associates will know for sure. Design your loyalty strategy from the top down, but design your tactical execution from the bottom up.
Schedule time for prelaunch training
Schedule time into all associates’ workloads to train them on the program. Inform them about every program detail, including all rules, terms, and conditions of membership. Teach them about the enrollment process, the program literature, the tracking systems, and the point-of-sale procedures. You should even have them spend time on your program’s Website to experience it from the member’s point of view. Grade associates undergoing training sessions, and reward your top students. This time commitment will be heaviest at program launch but should include continual updates throughout its lifespan.
Offer staff incentives
One of the best ways to ensure consistent program delivery is to offer performance incentives to your staff. You have a lot of choices. Each time an associate enrolls a customer, that associate should receive consideration. Set enrollment targets, and offer incentives for reaching them. Give thank-you cards to your members, encouraging them to hand them out to associates who go above and beyond, and then reward associates who earn the most cards. Incentives can vary—cash, merchandise, equipment, meals, and gift certificates all make great rewards. If expense is a concern, set a minimum level of preferred activity and draw a prizewinner from the pool of qualifiers.
Why go to this level of trouble? Because of the implicit benefit of practicing what you preach. Reward and recognition provide the cornerstone of all loyalty programs. By giving your staff the same opportunity as members to earn benefits for desired behavior, you’re reinforcing those principles while extending your communications reach. Your staff will take the extra time to learn and to explain the program to and assist best customers.
Focus on the customer experience
And as we all know, the most sophisticated loyalty program in the world won’t fix something as basic as broken customer service. With service levels so disparate in the travels of most consumers, in our consumer encounters we often feel like two different customers—in some cases we feel valued; in others, we feel unwanted and unloved.
Again, employee empowerment is the key to success. Emphasize customer service in all aspects of your training, with special emphasis on delivering great service to members of your loyalty program—who are, in theory at least, your most profitable customers. Integrate customer service training with your technology and operations training. This integration communicates that good customer service is integral, rather than in competition with your other policies. In this way, you can create a new standard of success: positive predictability, in which customers feel they’re listened to, valued, and treated fairly in every interaction with your brand.
Trust your employees—to a point
Empowering your employees means trusting them to make the right decisions. Even so, fraud is always possible, even among your staff. While most fraud-prevention measures should occur in your program design and implementation phase in order to close program rules and technology loopholes, you’ll need to figure out ways to watch for employees who game the system. Particularly if you offer employee incentives for sign-ups, make sure that sign-up incentives reflect real customer enrollments by deferring the employee incentive until the member’s first transaction occurs.
If your program allows for points accrual, then remember to periodically reconcile all account balances. You should, for example, compare last month’s overall point balance with this month’s point balance, and include points issued, changed, and redeemed. Do the same for award inventory numbers and other key numbers to help ensure there isn’t any leakage. Overall, you don’t need to track a large number of checkpoints, but you should go deep—you’ll need enough detail that, if you uncover a problem, you can quickly identify the root cause.
Remember that each hour and dollar you spend on training your staff will come back to you in the form of increased enrollment, higher member satisfaction, greater participation, and improved program results. Get your employees excited about the program, and their enthusiasm will rub off on your customers. The better they perform, the better your results.
Rick Ferguson is the editorial director for COLLOQUY, a provider of loyalty-marketing services.
Copyright COLLOQUY 2007 First rights only
Other articles by Rick Ferguson:
Dialogue, the Coin of the Realm
The Customer, Not the Payment Type, Is King
The Yin and Yang of Loyalty Marketing
Building Loyalty, Building a Database
