Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Join WillowTree’s Billie Loewen for a deep dive into growth marketing. In each episode, Billie discusses the latest news and topics in lifecycle marketing, chatting with a wide array of guests, including WillowTree colleagues, client-partners, and industry thought leaders. Let's grow!
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode
of Room For Growth. I am so excited to get to our
guests today. We are going to talk about
Loyalty, but like capital-L
Loyalty, not just what we talk about all the
time on this podcast, which is: how do we create
meaningful brand experiences and drive customer
loyalty. And then of course, there's loyalty
programs, the structure of them, the offers that
go with them, the intelligence that you need to
make a good one.
But today on the show, we are going to talk about
financial services in particular, because
financial services is humongous,
especially for some of the largest brands.
It's a regulated market which makes
personalization and technology challenges
more prominent.
And then just the complexity of those
organizational structures creates both,
I would say challenges, of course, but also
opportunities to do really unique and advanced
things in loyalty.
So we're going to get into kind of loyalty
at the highest degree. We're going to have a real
global perspective and talk about why a
global perspective is more critical than ever.
Without further ado, let's jump in to
our guests.
Hello everybody. Today I have two wonderful
WillowTree colleagues with me and we are talking
about loyalty.
And hopefully when I say we are talking about
loyalty, your response is, "Billie, of course
we're talking about loyalty. We have listened to
this podcast before, we know what Room For Growth
is all about." It is about customer
loyalty and how as a brand, you can build an
engaged fanbase and build loyalty for your brand
through all kinds of tactics.
So when I say that we are talking about loyalty,
what I really mean is we are talking about Big
Loyalty. Meaning if you are
one of the largest brands in the world, you are
primarily a global brand where most of your
revenue is coming from global audiences, and
you are trying to think about all of the elements
of how you create loyalty among
your customers.
What are the components that you need to
consider? So we're going to primarily focus on
financial services because I think financial
services loyalty is particularly complex.
A) because it's a regulated market,
B) because customer trends are just quite
different, and what they expect from a financial
services brand is different.
So when I say that we're today, we're talking
about loyalty, what I mean is we are going to
talk about some of the largest and most
complicated loyalty programs that exist,
how to do them well, how they're evolving, and
how we think about global scale at a company
like, WillowTree. So I have two of the best and
brightest with me for this topic to help
tackle it from a multi-perspective lens, and
I am going to let them introduce themselves.
So Kate Gallaher, tell us who you are and how
you ended up here today on this podcast with me.
Hey Billie, good to see you.
Long time listener, first time caller
and honored to be on the podcast today.
So for me and my kind of career projection,
what I do at WillowTree, I lead our financial
services practice.
So for us that means anything from
payments to retail banking, wealth
management, and insurance.
So really covering kind of the gamut of
everything that you would see in this space.
Career-wise, prior
to this was a consultant, so really worked at the
intersection of technology
and strategy and kind of how those two things
have to be so interconnected
to drive the right outcome for organizations.
Caitlin, welcome back to Room For Growth.
Remind us who you are and tell us what
you're going to be focusing on sharing today
around customer loyalty.
Yeah. Hi, Billie. So good to be back.
My name is Caitlin Watson.
I'm a Partner of Marketing Services.
So what that means in form and function is I get
to lead our Marketing Services team here.
A big piece of what we do surrounds
loyalty. So thinking about loyalty programs,
personalization, loyalty messaging, go-to-market,
overhauling loyalty programs, advancing
them really kind of in everything that
a brand might need to reconsider about how
they're connecting best to their customers.
I get to lead a variety of clients across
all industries, financial services
being one, I get to work with Kate quite often,
which is always so fun.
Other services I work in are QSR,
CPG, eCommerce,
streaming, which is a really interesting industry
on the cutting edge of loyalty and thinking about
how to reengage workers in an interesting
digital age. So excited to be here today
and bring some industry knowledge
about loyalty and all best practices.
Awesome. Kate, talk to us a little bit...
You know, we work with primarily
large enterprise, and sometimes those brands
don't love to have their name just sort of
dropped willy-nilly on a podcast.
But give us a little bit of a sense of
who we work with at WillowTree to
just give folks a
sense of the scale of brand and the
broadness of deep
expertise across financial services.
Yeah. So like you said, we don't want
to-- we do such mission-critical work
with our partners. And so I wouldn't necessarily
want to kind of reveal all of those where I'm not
able to. But we do feel
or I personally feel privileged to be able to
partner with brands that you would see at the top
of your wallet that are in the
credit space, in the payments space, but also
doing really, really interesting things outside
of that, in travel, for example, in dining
and entertainment.
We have the privilege of working with over half
of the top ten banks in America, over
half of the top, 10,
15 banks in Canada, and
even some of the top banks across the globe.
Outside of Banking and Payments, though, we also
cover, like I mentioned, Wealth Management.
So, the
top three wealth management organizations in the
world we get to partner with and
then also Insurance.
So each of those,
kind of subsectors of the financial services
space are quite different in
a sense. But as we tie this into
loyalty, and as Caitlin said, we have the
privilege of working together.
You'll see that some of those trends and some of
those needs really across
whether it's B2B or direct to consumer, across
those brands that we work with in payments and
credit, banking, insurance, wealth management
start to converge.
And so we get to draw from kind of all of those
experiences across the entire industry.
So with that, I want to talk just a little bit
about some of the trends and evolution that we
are seeing in loyalty programs today,
particularly in the financial services
sector. So what are some of the factors
that are really driving the need to differentiate
loyalty today? This is such a big topic
where more and more frequently, brands are
investing in their loyalty programs and in their
approach to customer loyalty and even their
rewards.
I'm curious, Kate, tell us a little bit about
why. Why now are things shifting and shaking?
Digital has really impacted the financial
services, loyalty space in a few ways.
It has kind of both sides of the sword in a very
positive way, and also in almost a negative way
that makes it more challenging.
So the things that we are seeing, the
things that I am seeing in the markets specific
to financial services, is: 1) just
increased diversity of products.
Brands are moving outside of just
offering a credit card program,
right? They're moving into customer lifestyle as
well across travel: how can they
impact kind of your travel experience?
Dining: what can they do to
kind of shape really unique, cool experiences
for you as a customer? Shopping:
moving into the retail space, right?
Payments and embedded finance has a huge role
to play in that.
And so, you know, beyond just
having a financial advisor do one thing or
a retail bank do another and a payments
organization do another, we see an incredible
diversity of offerings that's available
to a customer in this space.
So that's one. And digital expands that, right?
2) Just ease of switching.
So, you know, with certain other
industries you kind of get locked into that brand
affinity. But in financial services, you're
looking for an outcome.
You're looking for a specific product or a
specific place for someone to
hold and guide and advise you on your money and
your financial situation.
Brand affinity is really hard to capture in
this space, and digital has made
the ease of switching across brands, and really
across products as well, even easier.
And then 3) Just the rise of fintech,
which we've been saying for years.
So I feel a little bit silly saying that today,
but it continues to be true, right?
We have digital-native organizations
that appeal to younger demographics
and generations. And as those fintechs
are able to be digital aggregators
and take all of your spend across
every product that you have into one place,
it presents kind of more of an opportunity
for loyalty, but also more of a challenge,
because it's easier to lose
that brand affinity.
Yeah, I think especially because so many
big financial brands are based in the US too.
A huge change for them is the
need to really shift away from a US-first
mindset.
That the way that
especially younger people around the world use
credit cards or open bank accounts, and what
they expect from financial institutions,
tremendously different than a US customer base.
So the prevailing wisdom of just like build it
for North America and then replicate, test
and optimize, that actually just can't be the
approach anymore. So I think that's really
brilliant, Kate.
Caitlin, I'm curious, you are knee-deep in all
kinds of loyalty programs across different
industries. What kind of trends and evolution are
you seeing?
Yeah, I think similar to financial services,
digitization of companies is
global. That is a trend that is hitting everyone
everywhere.
It is easier than ever for niche products,
niche companies to come into the space.
Actually an interesting company I was
looking at the other week, Bilt Loyalty
is a new kind of credit card provider and loyalty
provider, all based on gaining points
for paying one's rent with their specific
credit cards. So really, the ability
to appeal to a specific generation
or audience or cohort of users is
easier than ever.
So big, big brands that we work with are kind of
struggling to understand how do they diversify,
how do they appeal to masses
and kind of historical audiences that are in
their databases without losing the things
that make them so special and have made them
successful over the years?
I think security and Big Data is another
topic that financial services in particular,
but all companies are really,
really thoughtful of.
I mean, especially with the rise of AI, there's
a lot of consumer sentiment and mistrust out
there. So interestingly, and even some of our
own research, we're finding that not only
does the way a company have best data
practices and responsibly use personalization
matters, but also vehicle matters
for loyalty. So in some of our own
research on loyalty programs, especially
worldwide, an interesting tidbit that we
have found is that not only do customers
feel more secure accessing their loyalty
programs, accessing their financial programs
on an app or on a website, but
feel less secure on a mobile web experience.
So nuances matter when we
talk about loyalty, and we talk about how a brand
shows up for a client, regardless of industry,
but we think specifically for financial
services.
Totally. And I don't think many people
would perceive a loyalty program as particularly
challenging. So at the moment, the fact that we
are seeing so many brands come to us to overhaul
their loyalty program, whether it's QSR — coffee,
pizza — hotels, financial institutions,
travel and leisure, it's a really interesting
time. And some of those trends have positive
repercussions for the brand in unexpected ways.
One of the things that we often see, for example,
is that brands are giving too much to their
customers too early.
They're not actually changing and causing
behavior modification.
They're not able to — or they previously weren't
able — to understand customer behavior
the way they can now with technology and data.
And so now they're much more able to say, we're
not going to give quite as much upfront.
We're going to ask you to do a little bit more
for us as a brand, and then we'll reward you more
deeply when you actually display the behaviors
of loyalty that we want to see.
But that can happen in a way where the value
exchange is also significantly better,
where they may not need to give away, you know,
something of high value immediately out of the
gate because they can give something of perceived
value much more quickly with that
personalization.
Kate, I'm curious how you see personalization
as a critical component of how brands
develop their loyalty strategy.
What parts of personalization, particularly
in financial services, become kind of a
real reward for the customer?
How do they or how do you think about how to
personalize loyalty in a way that that value
exchange is good?
And how do expectations of the customer to
have personalization in their loyalty program,
differ across like industries or markets?
That's kind of a big one. But let me throw you
the, you know, get us in the same
in the same field together, and then we'll
explore more details.
Yeah.
So before answering
that question, because it's a big question.
So you hit on a little bit of
what does personalization look like?
What's the expectation of personalization in
financial services.
Kind of before even going through that, one thing
that I want to back up on, is just the
loyalty framework that we can
follow, that we use at WillowTree early
days when we're talking about kind of how do we
build a strategy.
So this three-R framework, right.
It starts with: Reminder.
So you need some sort of trigger
to engage with the customer to say,
oh, I need to take some sort of action.
Then the second one is: Routine.
So you build routines, you build behaviors.
You need data to understand what those behaviors
will be, but also to influence and drive what
that behavior should be or what you want it
to be in your loyalty program.
And then comes the Reward, which is something you
asked about, Billie.
So across each of those
we have the opportunity to drive personalization.
So that's why I wanted to kind of center on that
framework first. Right.
So whatever that trigger is,
whatever that Reminder is, having it
personalized, whether it's a mobile push
notification or some sort of email
communication or even anything else.
How is that specifically tailored to
your end customer that you're, that you're
targeting. Two, the Routine:
so thinking through kind of what that behavior
that you want to drive, is it, to your point,
are you hitting a KPI of pure engagement?
Are you hitting a KPI of cross-sell
and upsell and offering other products within
your portfolio?
Or is it exposing them to kind of new promotions?
And then what is that Reward?
What you were specifically asking about, though,
is how do we see rewards being
different in the financial services space versus
others? And I actually think that's a
it almost can transcend industry.
But we're seeing a lot in terms of just
specific personalized offers that might not
even be for some of your specific products,
but maybe a partner that you partner with.
So in the credit space we
partner with brands that support
hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands
of retail partners.
Can you provide a
cross-brand offering,
so that they feel like they're getting something
that is so hyper-personalized to them.
Is it other products?
Is it other rates or upsell
within your own product portfolio?
So that reward,
you'd think, "oh, in financial services, it
should just be if I have a checking or savings
account with you, now you should offer me a new
credit card." It could be something very, very
simple, along the path
that gives them access to new
products, new promotions that they might not be
familiar with within your own brand.
Can you show small moments of delight
that are simple, easy to identify, but
really continue to draw that customer
into that three-R framework that becomes
a habit. You trigger.
You create a routine.
You provide a reward. Sometimes it can be as
simple as that: showing fun, delightful,
easy, engaging progress towards something like a
savings goal.
I love those examples.
I am an AMEX Platinum cardholder, and one
of the trends that you called out that's so
critical is that more frequently, brands are
being asked to partner with other brands to
double and maximize rewards.
You see this with like an Uber and
your hotel where if you book an Uber from
your hotel app, you might get like double points.
Or for AMEX Platinum, they partner with Saks
Fifth Avenue, where you get a $50 credit,
twice a year, I believe, and I would never have
really purchased from Saks Fifth Avenue.
It's just not a place that I normally frequent.
But because they have this partnership and I'm
aware of it as part of being a cardholder, it's
not necessarily a loyalty benefit.
It's not like I'm using my points necessarily to
go shop there, but it's just the sort of like
surprise and delight and a way of exploring
brands that I might not have.
So I do think more and more frequently, the
partnership becomes a really critical component
of how you set your strategy as a global
financial services brand.
Caitlin, you deal in the nitty-gritty
of customer data every day.
You work on projects, everything from setting up
customer data platforms [CDPs] and thinking
through naming conventions and how to do
appropriate analytics marketing for different
apps and websites.
I'm curious how you think about personalization,
particularly in financial services, but more
broadly, what is the customer really asking for
today and how are we enabling it?
Yeah. Billie, I think the biggest
thing to underscore from what you all are saying
that I see as so exciting, and
as the opportunity that financial services has
in really outside of cash back or
getting benefits like low ATM fees
or better customer experience overall, really
that benefit that most especially credit card
services find is in those partnerships.
And they're really kind of the first to do it
right is quite different from a Starbucks where
you might buy a coffee, get a coffee, buy
a coffee, get a coffee.
They're extending their brand into these
partnerships. So while that's so exciting
and there's so much ground to lay there, that's
actually where we see a lot of our partners still
struggling today, because the data that
underpins delivering that right partner
to the right person is actually quite hard
still to orchestrate.
So having the right tech stack as your foundation
to be able to power and enable those personalized
experiences, whether that be on web or mobile
or your marketing-owned channels or
even paid channels is quite an organizational
feat to pull off.
Understanding customers who are in your database,
what they're doing, how they're behaving is so,
so, so important, and then creating all
the fundamental channels and ways in which you're
going to connect up.
The advice that we give even to large global
brands is to start small and
to test. So, to test out use cases,
to test out where you think you might be able to
move the needle.
And this changes globally.
I think we said earlier, all of our research
findings time and time again help to underpin:
designing for North America first is just
not the way to reach global markets.
Unless you're independently creating offerings
and services and experiences for each of those
markets, which most aren't doing and isn't
great at scale, it's really
thinking about new markets, markets where credit
is actually quite a new offering
to those audiences.
And considering how cultural impacts
might also tailor these cohorts.
So underlining that ,Billie,
it is not easy.
That is where we often spend the bulk of our time
in helping our financial institutions, or
even other industries just understand who are
their users, what do they want?
And then putting kind of all the pipes in place
to be able to make that personalization happen.
Totally.
Caitlin and Kate, I think a lot about a brand
that we recently worked with together that's a
major financial institution.
They're trying to build a more personalized
marketplace. Just meaning when you show up on
their website or in their app, they want to
make sure that the brands that they partner with
and frankly, brands that they don't are providing
the best offers to customers.
So, you know, this is a pretty table stakes
experience. You sign into your app, you see
that you have ten offers from different brands
that might be like 5% off at this brand or 10%
off at this brand.
But just the logistics of how you make that
compelling and available is very
challenging. So, for example, and this is just an
example, as a credit card company, customers
assume, "hey, you know, I love Nike.
I shop at Nike all the time.
If you are my credit card provider, you can see
how often I'm shopping at Nike and how much I'm
spending. Why wouldn't you give me
a Nike offer if that one's available?"
Or, "You know, my zip code, you know the region
I'm in. You know that I
don't have a White Castle anywhere near me.
Why would you serve up that offer, for example?"
It's very interesting to say things like,
to work with a brand where it'd be easy to say,
let's take past purchases and location,
use just those two data points to determine
which offers you should surface to them first in
their app experience. But then the complexity
behind that, it's just an absolute iceberg.
Like the data complexity of that is so much
greater than,
you know, our friends in IT right now are
cheering. They're like yeah, exactly, exactly
right., we've been saying this for years.
But it's really complicated. And then on top of
it we have to help empower our clients to
take data that says, A) here's the cohort of
people who love your brand.
Here's how often they're shopping, here's what
they're spending, here's their average spend.
Can we work together with your marketing team to
create a compelling offer that then we're going
to put in our marketplace?
That's just a lot of cohesion across different
teams and technologies.
Which is why I'm gonna ask Kate a question,
because, Kate, you are kind of the queen of
taking really complex, really ambiguous
challenges and reminding our clients
that the experience has to be simple.
I'm curious how you think about,
taking something so big and so vast and turning
it back into a simple, compelling experience?
Well, maybe you call me the Queen, because
although I work for a digital
agency that started as a mobile
agency, way back in the day,
I hate apps, Billie.
I hate mobile apps. I don't like to be
overindexed
in the digital space. And so therefore, like the
way that I think about it, I need something
that is so, so, so simple and so, so,
so easy to use that it continues to
build that — like I was talking about that, not
to go back to frameworks — that three-R framework
of what we're seeing and
building those routines.
It needs to be so simple, so clean, so easy
to use.
So to your question,
taking complex problems and simplifying
it sounds like that would be a simple process.
But for us, kind of what we do and what we work
with our partners on is a few things:
Understanding, like you mentioned, understanding
your data, where it lives, how you can use it,
which a lot of times, as Caitlin was
articulating, requires significant
investment in pulling information
out of legacy systems to be able to compete with
those organizations that are unhinged
and unburdened from those legacy systems.
So that's number one, kind of understanding your
data foundation and kind of where it lives, how
you can use it, and then pulling it into
something like models, that it can be surfaced
in a really clean, simple way to an end customer.
Number two, though, for simplicity,
we think a lot about and do a lot of research
just talking directly to customers about what
they want to see and how that should be surfaced
and truly a UI, UX perspective.
So, to your point, like with the marketplace
example, rather than going
and scrolling extensively,
to try to find the right offer for myself,
can we use machine
learning models and AI and the data that
is able to be stitched together?
Although like you said, there's regulation
and and restrictions on that.
But can we use what we have to kind of surface
the most relevant thing at the most relevant time
and do test-and-learn to identify what
the customer is responding to, what I'm
responding to. Right.
And then can you make the design so clean and
simple? So can you make that reward so clean
and simple that it's easy to come back to.
I think that's critically important as well.
Yeah. Caitlin, I'm curious what else
you think about in terms of the behavior
modification that brands should be aiming
to achieve or what they would measure or how they
might determine what priorities
to put first when they think about how
to hit the intersection of kind of like delight,
but also brand value,
in a compelling way.
You know, for every brand that's investing in
these loyalty programs, there has to be an
outcome for the spend that they're creating.
But sometimes that's very lagging.
I'm curious how you think about this.
That's a great question, Billie.
And every brand looks at a couple different
things. However, they all center around
understanding churn of users.
So like Kate mentioned earlier, the
ease of switching, especially in the credit card
provider space, is higher and higher
every day.
It is easier, faster, better to sign
up for something
with the click of a button and installing a new
mobile app. So retaining customers —
longevity and lifetime value of that customer —
is something that we track tooth and
nail. We know as marketers
that it is far less expensive
to retain a current customer than to acquire a
new one. So really nurturing those customers and
understanding how they're returning to your app
or web property, how they're using their points,
as you mentioned, Billie, how they're spending
with you. What share of wallet do you have
with them is so critical to keep a pulse on.
So those are kind of the indicators that we
always use to understand: are things going well?
The second thing that we always think about is
actually financial impact to the company itself.
So something that we hear a lot from our clients,
are that they — while maybe it's retaining
customers and customers are continuing to
use and love their loyalty program.
It might not be financially sound for the
business. So understanding if they're giving
away too much, if they're not giving
away enough, if it's eating in their profit
margins of customers who would have bought that
item regardless of this habit
that we're trying to build?
So understanding that fine line between
balance is something that we often help our
clients think about, and restructuring
or taking a hard look at their current loyalty
program.
So wanting to make sure that we're equitably
considering that customer-first approach
and how we're designing, developing experiences,
but also understanding how it fits within the
business model and how we can be thinking about
others that are coming into the space.
One of the things that is especially
challenging, but also
a huge opportunity in financial services,
is the fact that large financial services brands
are often B2B.
They're B2B2C.
They're direct to consumer.
They have a number of different products.
That means they might have a relationship with
their B2B partners that's really dependent where
the end customer for them is that business.
Or maybe that business partner
is just a conduit ultimately to the customer.
Or perhaps they're building products that
directly introduce their brand to the customer,
and they have to think about how all of these
various relationships, products, and consumers
help them grow, help them create unique
experiences, give them, of course, technology
and customer data platform challenges.
God bless all of our financial services clients
who we've helped with CDP implementations.
We are thinking of you right now because we know
how challenging it is to integrate across all
those spaces. But Kate, how do you
think about those different relationships,
those different kinds of business constructs,
and relate that back to the opportunity
in loyalty?
Really great observation.
I'm glad you called that out, Billie, because so
many of our partners, particularly in
the Payments space, for example, and even
in Banking as well, their
customer is B2B.
However, that customer is B2C.
So many times we have
partners and clients that we work with that sit
really squarely in that B2B2C
space.
However, much of their KPIs
today and the data that they can gather
is in on the B2B side.
But ultimately the ultimate kind of sale is
in that B2B2C side.
And it's really easy for us, as we've been having
this conversation, right, to think about
ourselves as the end consumer and what we kind of
want in our loyalty rewards program
with cash back or travel or
whatever it is.
But where we see challenge
but also opportunity is many
of those players operate in
almost like the white label platform space.
So that's where we also,
have cut our teeth.
How do you build a platform that is going
to be best for the financial services
organization's direct customer,
on the B2B side, but also enables
them to have a really powerful experience
for an end consumer like the three of
us, right?
So for us, there are few things that
matter.
None of these will come as a surprise.
And, Caitlin, I'll pass it to you in a second
to talk about the technology side, but,
number one is kind of building that unified
platform that's highly scalable.
And so we're able to do that.
I know when I say that everyone
in, unless you're a fintech, starts thinking
about, well, legacy systems, legacy systems,
legacy systems, disparate data, siloed
organization, etc.
And we get that.
We understand that and we manage
and work through that every single day.
But there's still the ability to architect a
really thoughtful platform that does drive
unification for the B2B
space that then sells to end direct consumer.
But unification, scalable
global platforms.
And there's kind of thoughtful technology
considerations as well, which, I could
speak to. But honestly, I think, Caitlin, you're
probably best ingrained in
that space to hit.
Yeah Kate. I mean, you are absolutely right.
Legacy systems is something that we talk about
day in and day out in our financial services
client space.
You know, traditionally there's something built,
especially in this space with security
in mind. So scalability and the thought of
moving to something to
empower those white label solutions is quite
scary. It takes a lot of time and effort
and energy, but we find that the clients
of ours that do are the ones leading the
pack, because we know that B2B
space, that B2B2C space is so important.
Users like us are expecting
those customer experiences that you might get
from a retail brand, or something else that's in
your wallet, in your life.
So as we think about scalability and flexible
design, CDPs are usually
the place that we start, helping to
migrate to something that is best-in-class,
that's really cutting edge, that can sync up to
loyalty experiences is key here.
We think about things like an Adobe partner
that have that flexibility, have that scale,
are always investing in upgrading
their platforms, their custom solutions
to be able to meet the needs of the industry
and the needs of the customer where they are
today. So pinpointing the right
solutions partner is ideal.
And then investing that time and kind of
migrating off to create that scalable
white-label solution.
Often times, Kate, as you mentioned,
is really critical as we think about scale
too. It's not only scale and volume or
scale and personalization, but scale in a global
manner as well. Fundamentally, being
able to shift on a dime the experience that a
user gets when they walk in thinking about
that modular design, thinking about how
we can serve up the right thing at the right time
to the right user, wherever they are.
Sounds easier than it is.
But investing, taking time
to really go through a thoughtful process of
evaluating CDP vendors, marketing
technology vendors, website platform
vendors, CMS platforms, it's so critical.
And then creating those custom pieces along
the way where you need to, to connect those
disparate systems, even if just for a
time to kind of migrate on to something best in
class is critical.
Caitlin and Kate, you are two of the
smartest people I know in this space.
And yet I will say that in WillowTree, we often
have robust discussion and sometimes even
disagreement about what's the best thing to
start with, particularly when we're bringing in
global audiences, because often it's really easy
to just be like, North American audience is huge.
Start with North America, build for them, and
then scale out like that's prevailing wisdom.
I'm really curious just for a moment, because I'm
feeling spicy on this Wednesday afternoon,
let's talk about some of the ways that we often
disagree as we move from brainstorm
into ideation into customer research
about how to approach global loyalty and
where the best place is to start.
Well, Billie, hot take, I was actually just
discussing with some of our design team
the other day as we think about designing
UI and experiences for customers, especially
in the kind of fintech space
that really lives on these partnerships.
So bringing in offers and rewards and promotions
and discounts, travel points
all into one space for one customer.
As we're thinking about design systems,
how we label those, oftentimes you'll
find when you log in to a major credit card
provider of yours, there'll be a little promotion
space and a little travel rewards space.
And we really kind of create these artificial
buckets for how we think about offers and rewards
and self-label them often, in my
opinion, from a very business-centric
mindset of of how those things come
back to us in the business, how we get those
deals.
But in my opinion, they are not customer-centric.
I think a player that's doing this really well in
this space is actually Affirm.
I have a Peloton
payment through them.
I'm often in their app every month, paying
off my Tread Plus.
One of the things that they do really well is to
tear down all of those silos.
So there is no meaningful difference in the way
that they have design systems and the way that
they talk about these things.
It is all brand focused and brand
focused in a personalized way.
So me as Caitlin, I come in and I
see things about Nike, I see concert experiences.
All of those are kind of missing the labels
that as companies, we tend to put on them.
And I think what that does is opens up that
feeling of a truly personalized experience,
whether it's really personalized or not, even if
it's, you know, a quarter mile of the way there.
What we're getting to is kind of breaking down
those artificial silos that can sometimes shackle
us as companies, and really connecting
with the user on the thing that matters most to
them, which is what they're getting in return.
So an interesting place to
be in, I think specifically for fintech,
as we consider, but really examining
where we using language or even pushing
on consumer experiences or in our white label
experiences, things that might
just be old norms that we have as companies
and folks within the industry and examining
those and what they mean to the consumer, kind of
pushing ourselves on being consumer-first.
Yeah, I love something you said there too,
Caitlin, and what I continue to reinforce across
all types of clients, which especially in
the age of AI, language is more important than
ever. Language is how humans decipher:
can I trust this?
Is this offer coming to me
something that I can believe in.
So there's of course the relevance of it, but
often times language is just critical
to get right. And foreign language translation,
if you're offering something blanket as sort of a
UI template, and then you're populating it with
something personalized, is a place where we see
brands get this really wrong.
It could be as simple as the word "mobile"
versus "mobility," which is like a US/Canada
difference, for example.
But it could get into like, is this person
a Spanish or a Portuguese speaking
customer living in Brazil or living
in Portugal? And how do you make sure that you
get language right? That drives meaningful
conversion change and meaningful change in terms
of just loyalty to a brand, and understanding,
and is often very expensive to figure out
how to get right. So I always think about that
one on top as well is like what is going
to be our language generation
component here? And how are we going to create
compelling content that still has a bit of that
local flavor at scale?
Kate, I'm curious if you have any that you're
thinking about. Yeah.
Well, so while I, you know, on
paper and as a thesis, I completely agree
with everything Caitlin said and like she said,
we're teammates in this.
But at the same time, like, let's not forget that
there are many organizations that started well
before our firm, right, that have kind of
structured ways in which they need to go
get business case approval for how they get
funding for certain things, like everything we've
been talking about, like building that unified,
scalable platform, and using
the right martech stack to drive future
enablement.
And so, we have to give a little bit of grace
to some of the brands that we see out there.
However, Caitlin is not wrong.
She's dead-on right. But like you as
a customer, so even in the B2B2C space,
really thinking about that customer need
like they aren't thinking about the business case
that had to go be approved for
to get funding to build platform
X, Y and Z.
And so therefore I think that there is, we have
healthy contentious dialogue
on what is that intersection between
driving business KPIs and
then also having something that is user-centric,
backed by data-driven research
that all of our PhDs do in the background.
But it's intentionally healthy contention.
And so I think that it's even kind of rethinking
the KPIs that we're driving towards and ensuring
that those outcomes are the right ones.
Because I come from a business background,
like I spent decades in consulting.
And so you see at the top level
just kind of what the conversation is for risk
management, risk mitigation and kind of how
we're thinking about ROI on a lot of the things
that we've talked about.
Globally, though, I think you raise a
wonderful point, Billie.
That part
of what we see organizations, where they
end up missing from where they start off
is not investing — although I'm talking
about kind of building the business case — but
not investing early on to understand
regional differentiation
and regional different needs of the end
customer, or even what the different KPIs
should be. So there's commonalities,
right? We've talked about kind of Routine, Reward
and and kind of how you drive
that loyalty.
There's obvious commonalities
that our researchers find across regions.
Folks, no matter where you live,
love cash back. They love focus on
offers and promotions on essentials.
People, regardless of region like to travel
is what some of our research or early research
kind of starts to find cross across geo,
but ensuring that we're always bringing
it back to that data, but then also
kind of understanding what KPIs
are we trying to drive?
Because that, to Caitlin's point, can
kind of shift us away from being
end user centric, correct geocentric,
cross-geography centric.
And so sometimes those need challenge
as well. Healthy challenge, of course, but
challenge as well.
Totally. Yeah.
One of the things I love so much about WillowTree
is it's one of the few places where you can take
an analyst and somebody who's a CDP expert, a
designer, a researcher who's done global
research, people who have worked on 10 or 15
different brands across different spaces.
And they can say things like, "hey, when we
worked on QSR, one of the offers that we saw work
really well for loyalty was something geolocation
based. Can we take, you know, geolocation
and think about how to apply it to a major credit
card." And then have a solutions architect who's
really thinking about how you would create a
backend system that would support that, and what
would be required from engineering, so that we
can even have that business perspective to say,
"Hey, yeah, if we were going to reach this
segment of people and we're going to size them to
be this many, it would have to create a change in
behavior of X to even make the investment
in the labor worth it." Like, we can have those
conversations relatively quickly in a small
room to bring perspective.
That's really deep.
And, you know, unfortunately,
so many brands in their day to day, they don't
get to cross silos like that.
They don't get to stop and consider in a really
cross-functional way what might be new,
different, best way to approach things.
So super interesting.
Caitlin and Kate, it has been wonderful to have
you both today. We could talk about this forever
because it is truly some of the most complicated
challenges that we deal with is: how do you take
an incremental but simultaneously impactful
approach to thinking about some
of these major challenges at scale in a global
ecosystem?
But I love the perspective that you both have
brought to this monumental task.
Thank you for being here today, and I hope you
have a wonderful rest of your day.