RetailerSpeak: A combined loyalty program proved to be more customer friendly

Last year, Indus League launched One League, integrating seven of its brands under one hybrid unified loyalty program. ShopTalk catches up with Rachna Aggarwal, CEO, Indus League to know more about the program, its genesis and the results so far.

1. Congratulations on the success of ONE League program. Can you tell us a little more about objective behind launching a unified program and the decision making process ILCL went through for it?

One of ILCL’s key distribution channels is our own exclusive brand outlets. We used to have different loyalty programs for each of our brands and noticed that there was a fair amount of duplication in their customer base. It was also an inconvenience to the customers to carry multiple loyalty cards and often missed the benefits of the programs. Therefore we decided to simplify our loyalty program through a unified model, which could allow the customers to maximize the benefits yet making it user friendly and convenient.

In a typical scenario, if the husband shops at Urbana, there is a possibility that the wife will shop at Scullers for her and kids at Jealous 21. We saw this as an opportunity and decided to leverage each brand’s potential to boost others. A combined loyalty program proved to be more customer friendly with better appeal across different customer segments across all brands thus helping brand loyalty for ILCL as well as its individual brands.

2.What benefits the ONE League program extends to the customers compared to the previous, individual brand loyalty programs?

The biggest benefit members enjoy with ONE League is that now it’s instant! Earlier, it took upto 15 days to credit points to a loyalty account, now it is done the moment a purchase is made. Capillary’s InTouch allows us to gratify our customer instantly through SMS updates, m-vouchers etc. the moment a transaction is done. InTouch sends automated reminders for points expiry, special offers, birthday messages etc, which has resulted in better rate of redemptions.

The entire system is more transparent and the customer can easily keep a track of her loyalty account. The registration process is completely paperless now and takes less than 30 seconds to enroll. One League was specifically designed in a way where the customer can accumulate and redeem points at any of our outlets.

3. ONE League is a hybrid loyalty program, a combination of mobile and card based models. Please tell us a little bit more about how it works?

The mobile technology adds scale to One League and the card is used for creating brand recall. Once enrolled, the member can manage the loyalty program on mobile until reaching the Gold slab, where she is issued a standard Gold Card. Upon moving to next slab, the customer is issued a personalised Platinum card. Thus there is an aspiration factor attached to the loyalty program, encouraging the customer to move up to the next level of loyalty program faster.

InTouch, which is integrated with our POS software, Shopper, has automatic triggers and automatic data capture features, which has empowered our storefronts in managing loyalty in 74 ILCL stores across India. It also allows us to cross-promote our brands more effectively by instantly giving offers on different brands based on customer profile and purchase pattern.

4. As a retailer what benefits do you feel you have received by having a unified program?

The unified model has helped us to have a larger and deeper reach across all customer segments. We have better understanding of our customer demographics, their profile, needs and demands.

Thanks to the mobile technology, our cross-sell and up-sell promotions are yielding better results. Overall, our sales across all brands are much better than before, and more importantly, the brand loyalty quotient among customers has increased significantly.

5. Please tell us about some metrics you track – in terms of enrollments, engagement and revenue generation etc. How does the unified program fare compared to your earlier programs.

We were tracking metrics like conversion and contribution from loyalty to sales, points earning and trends, zone-wise, store-wise performance indicators, Recency, Frequency and Monetary contribution of customer in our previous programs, but due to us getting unified data from all brands, the same metrics are producing better insights now.

With Capillary, we also started tracking new metrics like consumer preferences, campaign ROI, and cross-pollination etc. These metrics have given us more control over our marketing campaigns, making them work better.

6. What is your strategy to further improve Customer Loyalty? What future additions to your loyalty program are in pipeline?

We have many exciting strategies which will be taking shape in coming months. We will be soon integrating social media to our loyalty program, engaging the customers further at online social networking platforms through exclusive contests, offers and announcements.

To generate more word-of-mouth publicity, we will be soon introducing a referral program in which we will encourage our existing loyalty members to share discount vouchers with their peers and be rewarded in the process themselves.

We are also in process of launching a new corporate version of One League, where the all the loyalty members enrolled from a company will enjoy additional benefits across all ILCL brands.

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