Greetings and welcome to the Loyalty program builders podcast. Here, we partner with leading loyalty experts to address both the business and technical hurdles encountered during the development and operation of loyalty programs, all while leveraging a strong customer loyalty strategy for guidance.

In this episode, we talk with the specialist Monika Motus about how loyalty program managers can collaborate effectively with stakeholders. 

Who is the customer loyalty expert?

Monika Motus is a seasoned professional in the field of loyalty programs, with a background at renowned brands such as Starbucks (AmRest), iSpot, and Douglas. 

She possesses a deep passion for loyalty initiatives and maintains a keen interest in tracking developments within the loyalty industry. Her focus is on extracting valuable insights from loyalty programs and staying on top of emerging trends in this sector.

What you will learn about collaborating with loyalty program stakeholders

Loyalty program managers must wear many hats during different stages of the program – from educators to brand ambassadors. They also have to be ready to be challenged.

It’s demanding, but managers don’t have to do it alone. In fact, they can’t, as Monika explains. Program managers should balance the analytical work of gathering data with the communication task of sharing the discoveries with other departments.

Newcomers and veterans are sure to benefit from the conversion, as Monika goes deep into the place of a program manager in the company, discusses stakeholder relationships in different stages of the program, and presents practical tips. 

You can listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Podcasts, and here:

Key takeaways

• Loyalty programs require teamwork and cross-department collaboration to succeed.
• Loyalty program managers have access to invaluable data and insights. They can and should leverage this knowledge to help marketing, sales, and operations.
• Loyalty program managers must balance analyzing data internally with sharing insights with stakeholders.
• Loyalty programs have three phases, and each requires different ways to collaborate with stakeholders.

1. Planning phase or implementation phase – you act as an educator but also require support. The buy-in is easier if the program starts in the senior leadership, but communication is always necessary. Involve all relevant departments individually or with a workshop.
2. Launch phase – securing proper training of the team is essential.
3. Maintenance or development phase – other teams naturally lose engagement as the dust settles, but you must keep them engaged.

• To set and monitor KPIs, be sure to involve other teams.
• Don’t forget to celebrate successes, also with other teams.
• A loyalty program dashboard can include more than the basic financial KPIs. There are many insights on customer activity that only the loyalty program provides.
• When managing stakeholders’ feedback and expectations, don’t forget that the customer should be at the center of all activities. 

Three actions to improve how you work with stakeholders right now

1. Be proactive: Anticipate the challenges and always collaborate with the rest of the organization. When you find interesting insights, share them with relevant teams.
2. Reflect: Every day, think about how your work is contributing to the success of the organization and how is the loyalty program benefiting the business. This will help you rethink your approach and address the challenges that will naturally come.
3. Remember the essential: Include all relevant departments and solicit their feedback – but don’t let the customer experience get out of focus.

Loyalty program stakeholder relationships inspiration corner

“Loyalty is not a one-man show. If we want to build a successful program and deliver value to our customers, we must collaborate with the rest of the organization and we must share this customer-centric state of mind with the rest of the team.“

“Many of the loyalty KPIs – the numbers, the metrics – are the result of the hard work done by other departments in your organization.”

“The secret is that everyone in the organization can lose motivation, but you cannot. You must be this person who will be constantly driving the excitement about loyalty, pushing forward, and keeping the ball rolling.”

Full episode transcript

The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Introduction

Irek: Hi, Monika. Great to have you on the podcast.

Monika: Hi, Irek, thank you for having me.

Irek: It's great that you joined us because you are an experienced loyalty program manager, right?

Monika: Yeah, I hope we can say so, but I have a couple of years of experience with loyalty, so I really hope we can discuss what are the challenges but also the positive sides of working as a loyalty manager.

What makes a loyalty program manager?

Irek: Oh yeah, and I'm really excited about this one. I will just start with a basic but very critical question. Who is a loyalty program manager?

Monika: Well, that's that! That's the tough one! No, I'm kidding. So I think that the loyalty manager is a very interesting person in the organization because this person has access to a huge amount of interesting data and is driving the relations with our customers. 

On the one hand, the person is working very closely with the data insights, etc. On the other hand, it is very important when you work as a loyalty manager to collaborate with other departments in this but also help the other departments with the loyalty insights in their work, in planning, in understanding the business better. 

I think what is very interesting when it comes to the position of the loyalty manager is this, let's say, a balance between the data and delivering the insights and collaboration with other departments.

Balancing analysis and teamwork

Irek: This is interesting because very often people who work with data prefer this deep individual work. They are strong individual contributors. But on the other hand, as you said, being a loyalty manager requires collaboration, cross-team initiatives, and constant communication. Could you tell us a bit more about the balance between this solo deep work and the teamwork?

Monika: Yes, so I think every loyalty manager has this ability or has the position to decide how much time he or she wants to spend on the solo work focusing on the data, analyzing, planning, and implementing the loyalty calendar, and how much time the loyalty manager wants to invest in building the relation with other departments.

The secret is to keep the balance and to secure both areas because both of the aspects of working as a loyalty manager are super important. 

The challenge for most of us is that, as we step into the role and we have access to very interesting data, we analyze those data, we adapt our activities and strategies to the data we see in our reports… There's a challenge that we would like to stay in this area all the time – analyzing the data, translating them into actions, our actions, and doing a lot of amazing stuff – but not informing the rest of the organization what kind of amazing stuff we are doing. 

So the challenge is to step out of our loyalty area and start building the relation with other departments, show the organization the value and the insights we are having and also build the relation and successful collaboration with the rest of the organization.

Because this is something we need to understand: loyalty is not a one-man show. If we want to build a successful program and deliver value to our customers, we must collaborate with the rest of the organization, and we must share this customer-centric state of mind with the rest of the team. 

That might be super challenging in some situations for some people because this collaboration with the rest of the teams usually costs us a lot because, as a loyalty manager, you are trying to sell, to promote your area and it requires a lot of energy, also some soft skills, communication skills. 

Loyalty managers are very often challenged by the rest of the organization. So you need to deal with this challenge, be always one step ahead of the challenge and also find your position in the organization. A position where the rest of the team perceives you as an expert, as a person who is not only the leader of building loyalty and long-lasting relationships with our customers, but also the person who has the knowledge and the insights that can help marketing, sales, and operations team to build our business and also base decisions on the insights from the loyalty program.

How a loyalty program manager can help other teams succeed

Irek: This is great. I really like this idea of loyalty program managers helping other teams out. And I thought about it as a sort of like a superpower that you have. Could you give us a few examples of how a loyalty program manager can help other teams succeed?

Monika: As I said before, as a loyalty manager, we have access to a huge amount of super interesting data, and actually this is our work: to analyze this data, to analyze customers' behaviors, to identify some customer paths, etc. and to think about how can we develop this super interesting data because we know a lot about our loyalty members. What do they buy, when they buy, how often do they interact with our brand, etc.. 

Based on all of this data, we really can draw some interesting conclusions and build insights to help the rest of the organization.

Examples: leveraging data to support marketing, sales, and operations

For example, helping the marketing team design communication or plan the promotions or activities for the specific segments of the customers. 

We can also help the sales or operations teams understand our customers better. For example, what is the difference between loyal and non-loyal customers? Are there any differences in their behaviors? How do you work with those customers? What is the difference between, let's say, having a sales conversation with a loyalty customer who already has a solid relationship with the brand and with a first-time buyer or someone who just entered our shop and with whom the relationship just started?

Collaborating with stakeholders part 1 – planning phase

Irek: Definitely you have a lot of insights you could distribute among everyone in the organization. We will definitely dive deeper as we go on. We briefly discussed that we could talk about three stages. The first one is planning, the second one is launch, and then we have maintenance. Could give us an overview of who and how to collaborate with, like at these three stages. Let's start with planning. How about this one?

Monika: Yes, sure. So I think it is a good idea to split our discussion into those three stages because, as we said at the beginning, collaboration is the fundamental part of the loyalty manager's work,, but the teams you collaborate with, the way you collaborate with them at each stage of the loyalty different.

Starting with the planning phase or implementation phase. Actually, this is the essential or super fundamental part of work for the loyalty manager because this is the moment where you have the unique chance to actually introduce the concept of the loyalty program to the organization. There is an idea of implementing a loyalty program. You start the work, you inform the organization about the concept, you inform your colleagues why we are doing this as a company, what will the loyalty program bring us, but also how will the loyalty program influence the daily work of our colleagues from other departments like marketing, legal, finance, etc. 

At this stage, it is super important to remember everyone who should be involved at this stage because, on the one hand, you have this educator role where you actually introduce the concept of loyalty to your colleagues. On the other hand, you really need their help and support to work on the loyalty program concept and the implementation plan.

Irek: So how does it happen? Is it some sort of like an organic process where teams actually get together, or do you need some workshop for that? What is your experience here?

Monika: It depends on where the idea or where the decision of implementing the loyalty program comes from. Whether this is the decision coming from the senior leadership or this is the idea that arises within, let's say, the marketing team, and you're trying to convince your senior leadership and the rest of the organization for the implementation. 

But usually – or pretty often – this idea is coming from the top, so from the senior leadership of the organization, which is great because, once you have the support of the senior leadership, it is way easier to cascade this focus to the rest of the organization.

From my perspective, this is the first step: to align with the senior leadership, make them aware, get them on board and engaged, but also to manage their expectations when it comes to the loyalty program. And, when it comes to the rest of the organization, it is up to the loyalty manager to decide on the strategy, whether you prepare a checklist of all the departments and think about what might be the role of that specific department in the loyalty program design planning and implementation, or you just try to build the workshop with all possible people involved and manage the discussion to see what might be or who might be involved in the process.

Tips on effective communication

Irek: Okay, I'm thinking about effective communication here. I wanted to ask you about your experience, and I believe that you have some practical tips on how to do that because it is a challenge to collaborate cross-team and effectively proactively communicate about the things you're doing and how it can influence other teams and the benefits that it can bring. Could you give us any sort of advice on effective communication?

Monika: At this stage of the planning phase, I usually like to organize not one-to-one meetings but small meetings with each department to introduce the topic, address any arising questions, or also answer or deal with the initial challenges coming from your colleagues. 

This gives a very comfortable space for you but also for your colleagues from other departments to discuss this topic in detail, to understand what is ahead of us and how we expect or we see the role of the team we are talking to and maintenance of the loyalty program. So I think it also gives your talking partner the comfort of asking questions at this state, and, in case you organize the big workshop with everyone, this might not be a very comfortable space for everyone to ask questions.

Something that worked for me so far pretty well was, in the beginning, just to organize the meetings with all the departments you believe should be involved in the process – such as IT, legal, marketing, finance, and operations – and specifically discuss their areas individually and in details. Once we have the initial feedback, we can build already a detailed or clarified list of steps we have ahead of us. We can start organizing the workshops, or status or projects group meetings, where all the people will be involved and already we will be ready to go one by one through the beginning. I think it's easier and probably more effective to connect individually with each department.

Irek: Okay, that's a great tip. Thank you so much for that. We start with one-on-one meetings with heads of departments, and then after these sessions, we are ready to organize a workshop where perhaps everyone can discuss the details.

Monika: Yeah, because, after the first meetings, the one-to-one meetings or small group meetings, we already are able to identify the role of this specific department in the process and what are the specific tasks to collaborate on. 

I think this is valuable, and the joint calls or workshops are also helpful for those people to get perspective on how the project is connecting the different departments of the organization and to show that we are not working in silos. Because my work, for example, as a lawyer, when I'm working on the terms and conditions, that also impacts the marketing team who is designing the communication plan, etc.

Collaborating with stakeholders part 2 – launch phase

Irek: This is great. I believe that we do have this idea of how to work during this planning phase. Let's move on to the launch. What changes, what do you emphasize at this stage?

Monika: The big bang date!

Irek: Yeah, exactly.

Monika: I think this phase brings a lot of fun. On the other hand, it is, of course, super stressful because we only have the chance to make the first impression once. 

From my experience, at this stage, everyone is working super hard to prepare everything to secure the perfect launch of the loyalty program. 

What is super important at this stage is to secure the proper training of the team, the availability of training materials, promo materials about the loyalty program to ensure that the people (for example, in retail in our stores and operations), but also the customer team or social media moderators, they are aware of the launch. That they received clear instructions on how to recommend the program to our customers and how to answer potential questions. Because we might believe that “Okay, this is obvious,” but in many cases, this might be obvious to us and not to the people who have the chance to work with the program for the first time.

To ensure the loyalty program launch is successful, at this stage, we really need to work really closely with the operations team and the customer care team to ensure that the knowledge is there. So, in case we start interacting with our customers and informing them about the program, we have solid knowledge and we are able to answer any questions and, in case of any potential problems or challenges, also help the customer to overcome those challenges.

Irek: Yeah, totally. I understand that these people become your loyalty program champions. Making sure that they understand what this program is, who it is for, and then how to invite people to join the program is taken care of. Do you have any practical tips on how to work with the customer care and operations team?

Practical tips on working with the customer care and operations team

Monika: Well, I think this is the tip in general for the collaboration part of the loyalty manager's work. Just stay close. Don't work in isolation because isolation leads to frustration.

And the closer you stay to those teams who have direct contact with our customers, receiving feedback from the customers… and those teams usually have super insightful and interesting feedback for us as loyalty managers about the program usage, program challenges, frequently asked questions, any potential technology problems our customers are facing. 

So the most important thing is to stay close, stay in touch, stay present, and don’t only throw the loyalty program to the organization and then just close yourself in your room and start analyzing the data, and that's it. Even though this is usually a lot of fun for us because we see the data coming, and we know that we can do amazing things with the data we have from the loyalty program. 

But this is something that we cannot do. We just all the time need to stay close to the rest of the organization. 

Setting loyalty KPIs together with other departments

Also, when it comes to the targets and setting up the KPIs. This is something that you cannot do in isolation because many of the loyalty KPIs – the numbers, the metrics – are the result of the hard work done by other departments in your organization. 

From my perspective, it is good to consult and align the targets because if the target comes from our joint discussion, everyone feels responsible for delivering this target. 

I think it is essential to involve those teams in the process but also to celebrate the successes. To monitor those numbers, appreciate the work of the teams in achieving the loyalty numbers. So yeah, just stay close, build the relationships, and show your value by presenting the insights no one in the organization has.

Irek: Thank you for sharing that because I feel it's not only about the information in the system, but it's also the information within the team. Everybody is experiencing the effects of the loyalty program. Especially people who work closely with customers have a lot of valuable information that we could then translate to other teams. 

Collaborating with stakeholders part 3 – maintenance and development phase

Irek: We organically moved to the maintenance part. If you could tell us a bit more about this stage within the loyalty program manager career path.

Monika: The maintenance and development stage is where most of the, or maybe not most, but many of the loyalty managers get frustrated.

Because, in the planning and the launch phase, there is a huge hype. There is something new we are doing in the organization, so everyone is excited, but the dust settles, everyone comes back to the daily tasks, and the loyalty manager stays pretty often alone at the stage. And naturally, you lose some motivation, you lose this hype and spirit. But the secret is that everyone in the organization can lose motivation, but you cannot. You must be this person who will be constantly driving the excitement about loyalty, pushing forward, and keeping the ball rolling.

Irek: Sure.

Monika: Yeah, this is super difficult for most of us because there is not so much excitement in the organization anymore. We come back to the, in many cases, boring tasks and people are coming back to their priorities. The role of the loyalty manager at this stage is to find your place in the organization to keep the fire, to constantly remind them about the loyalty program, the importance of the loyalty program. And I think we are all aware that loyalty is the long-distance run.

You cannot achieve success only by launching a loyalty program. So actually you need to turn the excitement into the habits because the real magic of the loyalty programs is happening in the next years after the launch.

Keeping the positive energy 

Irek: So I need to ask you this question. What was your secret? How did you stay excited about the programs? What is your secret to being this positive energy behind the loyalty program after the launch?

Monika: I think what is important is just to say that you need to understand that it's impossible to be excited all the time, right? You need to give yourself also some space to sit, to, let's say, complain a little bit. 

But then I think this is the perfect time to sit with numbers, verify the numbers, draw some conclusions, and prepare the insights. And at least for myself, having these insights, having access to the super interesting data was the trigger for me.

When I was analyzing the report, I said, "Oh my god, this is interesting, this is nice," and it was something I wanted to share with the rest of the organization. So what I think might help is to pay attention to be proactive in the collaboration with the rest of the organization. When you analyze the data, just don't put the results on your desk and do not enjoy it only by yourself. 

Just be proactive. Try to present it to the rest of the organization to create this excitement because this data we have is really something super interesting and might be interesting for other departments as well. So I think all the time trying, being proactive, and showing your presence in the organization are some of the key elements to not getting frustrated.

But, on the other hand, let’s remember that this won’t happen overnight, over one month. Sometimes, we need to attend ten meetings, and eight out of ten times, you will get the worst: spot after lunch when everyone is sleeping, and it looks like you are the only excited person in the room. But they listen to you, and it creates some type of awareness in their head. 

So step by step, one by one, you build this awareness, you get on board the rest of the people. 

But also, what I think is important is to manage the expectations. If you are proactive and make the first step and you present the data before someone comes to you with the question, with the challenge. It also gives you a better position to navigate and to actually lead the direction of the conversation.

I think this gives you a lot of comfort. This part of the work where you need to build the business case for the loyalty program and educate the organization on why it is important. When you do it proactively, you build the agenda, right?

And when you stay alone and you just focus on analyzing the data, doing work you can do by yourself, sooner or later, someone will come to you and say, "Okay, but yeah, why do we still have this loyalty program? What is the loyalty program bringing to the organization? What is the incrementality of the loyalty program? What is the business case? What is the return on investment?"

Irek: Yeah.

Monika: Of course, those are the questions we must answer and to which we need to pay attention. But I think it is better to proactively start thinking and working on this and then go to the organization and present the results for someone to come back to you with the challenge.

Irek: Oh yeah, for sure. And also, in my experience, it's very important to constantly remind people about the effects, about the benefits, about the insights of whatever you found out within running the project. 

Definitely it is very important loyalty, but it's also very important in any group or team effort, right? Just to make sure that people understand what is the reason that we are doing the thing that we are doing.

Being challenged as a part of being a loyalty program manager

You've mentioned that being challenged is also a part of being a loyalty program manager. But then, if you proactively prepare and have insights, you not only come with data on demand, but you actually can give some useful tips, perhaps. Or just make sure that you first look at the data and then you interpret the data and you come to the teams with a certain interpretation that might help them. 

So I've seen that this is a very important skill to develop. Would you agree with that?

Monika: Yes, totally. And yes, it is important to remember that challenge is the stable element of our work as loyalty managers. 

I was always wondering, “Why is no one challenging having the e-commerce shop so much, but everyone is always focusing on challenging the loyalty program.” But once you understand and accept this – that this is a natural question that sooner or later will land on your desk, so better start working on it –, it naturally comes as part of your work.

And, it is actually the role of the loyalty manager to prove the impact of the loyalty program and prove the benefit of the loyalty program in running the business because this is not something obvious. We are working on the optimization of the loyalty program. 

It might happen that the initial design of the loyalty program is not delivering the business results we were expecting or it's not positively perceived by the customers, they don't want to use it, they don't want to join our program. So we need to take it a step back, rethink our strategy, adapt the loyalty program, set up new KPIs, try to calculate this business case once again and try to do it once again. 

By launching the loyalty program itself… this is not granted, that having the loyalty program will give you incremental sales. The challenge is natural because we are offering something extra to a group of customers, so it’s natural to ask, “Okay, we give some additional benefits but, why are we doing this, and what is the benefit? Are we doing this right, or can we do it in a better way, or can we optimize our loyalty program somehow?”

It is important to be prepared for this challenge, but it’s also essential to have this challenge in your head every day when you go to work or you sit at your computer. You need to ask yourself, how is my work contributing to the success of the organization and how is the loyalty program I'm responsible for driving the business?

What should a loyalty program dashboard include?

Irek: Now I'm imagining... Compiling a dashboard for your loyalty program, making sure that this data that you've mentioned is there, so something you could actually proactively show to other teams and make sure that they understand the value of the program.

So what kind of data would you put in such a dashboard? Could you give us any examples? What to focus on when actually presenting the results of a loyalty program to other teams so that they support the whole idea?

Monika: Of course, one of the parts of the loyalty reporting is the focus on the financial KPIs, so the return on investment for the loyalty program, how, what is the frequency and average basket value for our loyalty members in comparison to the non-loyal members and what is naturally the loyalty program to influence the behaviors of our customers, of our members by increasing the frequency or increasing the average basket value or also prolonging or reducing the churn.

So, we can calculate the financial impact of the loyalty program on our organization and present the business case. 

But the second part of the data we are collecting and who can benefit as an organization coming from the loyalty program is this long list of the insights. What are people buying? When are they buying those products? Whether there are any established paths that difference between the segment of people coming during the weekdays in comparison to the people coming on the weekends, etc. All this knowledge we can possess thanks to the loyalty program.

Irek: Obviously, I need to ask you about your experience. Could you provide us with a case study? I understand that you might not give all the details, but if you could give us an example of a situation where, based on the insights you gathered, you could give a solid piece of advice to the business on how to change the things we do. Or how to modify the ways we operate. 

Monika: Tough question, tough question because using these data and insights, this is again an ongoing work. So it's difficult for me to now give you one example and probably I will not.

Summary and actionable tips

Irek: Okay, we can always come back to other case studies later on and maybe discuss something based on a proper context. Because perhaps you could figure out a product that we are promoting should be changed, let's say, that we should maybe focus on allocating the promo to some other segment. But we have covered pretty much everything that we planned to. Is there anything else you would like to share with the audience at this point?

Monika: Maybe trying to summarize what we discussed, trying to get some actionable tips for the loyalty managers. 

It's in terms of the collaboration when you work as the loyalty manager, I think the first and most important rule is that do not work in isolation because the isolation leads to frustration. 

The second one, use the data to build your expertise and the position in the organization.

And the third thing, and I think this should be actually the first point: never forget to put the customer at the center of all your activities. Because it might happen that trying to serve our internal stakeholders, trying to please and manage the feedback and of our colleagues or supervisors in the organization, we might forget that there is a customer, and the customer is always and should be always on the first place of our checklist and of our interests. 

Closing remarks

So just those three things I think are worth remembering. But I'm also interested in hearing other examples the loyalty managers experienced in terms of the collaboration part of their work. So it would be great to maybe hear or listen or read some examples of the challenges other loyalty managers deal with during their daily work.

Irek: Definitely, this is a great idea, and I will make sure that we do engage our community of loyalty program managers to ask those sort of questions and try to figure out what are their daily challenges, what are the kind of like problems they face, and I will make sure that we could then review, go back to it and then I hope that we meet again and we can discuss those particular challenges so then you could also share your tips or deal with those sort of challenges. So thank you so much, Monika, it was great. And see you in the next episode.

Monika: Thank you, see you soon.