How low do you have to push the effort bar for your customers to consistently participate in your loyalty program?  Is it:

a) Remembering and pulling out a loyalty card?
b) Opening a smart phone app and scanning a bar code?
c) Simply the act of paying?

Seems like a trivial issue but keeping the effort bar low takes a load off your company on the marketing side — where you have to invest in inspiring customers to collect rewards every time they make a purchase. 

Depending on the stage of your relationship with the customer (especially on the loyalty program side), this can be a big issue — when customers haven’t fully engaged or experienced the benefits of your rewards program, they’re less likely to be willing to put in a lot of effort to collect rewards ‘points’.

The point is engagement and data collection — both of which require that customers consistently participate — so using a system which keeps that bar as low as possible for CONSISTENT participation is key.  Cardify sets two bars — one very low (simply paying) to collect points and another a bit higher (opening a smartphone app) to gain access to targeted offers).

Mobile marketing provider Cellit released a benchmark study this week and its most telling insights speak to a company’s customer engagement infrastructure.  Through the good range of data points, we zeroed in on one point: that SMS’s potential as a powerful customer engagement tool depends on two things:

1. Respecting its limitations and ‘best practices’ for communicating with prospects and customers
2. Not operating mobile programs in a silo

The latter point is particularly important, because it balances out a company’s expectations from its mobile marketing programs and allows them to be used appropriately to their ability to engage customers.

Avoiding the ‘silo’ approach means:
- using a multi channel approach to interacting with customers
- connecting your mobile marketing systems to your overall CRM infrastructure
- leveraging each channel to it’s maximum potential but no more

The study shows that mobile marketing is akin to an oil well: there is an optimal limit to the production of both — exceeding it will ‘water it out’ — thereby destroying its long term value potential

Many restaurants have no clue who their customers are, and they often don’t get repeat clientele. Starbates is out to change that.

The Fullerton, Calif.-based company is creating a customizable loyalty program that restaurants can use to track and reward customers. Users can access a mobile app that allows them to check in and earn rewards without having to carry around paper loyalty cards.

We’re replacing the ‘buy 10 get 1 free’ punchcards and working with restaurants to reward their customers faster to keep engaging them to come back more frequently, said Jean Chong, chief executive and co-founder of Starbates, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/2v85dm/mobile_incentives) has announced the addition of the Mobile Incentives: The Next Step in Device Based Transactions" report to their offering.

Mercator Advisory Group's new report, Mobile Incentives: The Next Step in Device Based Transactions, analyzes the potential of the current market in terms of incentives, mobile device development,t and adoption as well as consumer demand for the ability to manage their incentives programs on their mobile devices. The report then surveys the current landscape of mobile incentives, providing an in-depth analysis of the most significant products currently on the market. Additionally, the report includes insights into anticipated future developments of mobile incentives.

Social media management application provider Engage121 has broadened its solution to include 4 key capabilities for social customer service:

1. Content gathering: customer conversations can take place across a multitude of platforms include the most prominent social sites as well more specific review site and blogs — your company needs to gather the data from all of them in real time

2.  Real time case creation: Delivering the CRM part of the equation, translating conversations into cases that can actioned in real-time

3. Case Management and Permissions Management: Allowing for consistent cross team management of cases ensuring more complex problems are driven to resolution

4. Reporting: Delivering key metrics about everything from problem areas to demographics to Social Media platform activity levels.

Companies often take a wait and see approach to social media customer service, incorrectly assuming that they can wait to invest in infrastructure systems, after ensuring that business ROI is available.  But as the above list shows, ROI is only available when the infrastructure is there to support social CS efforts by ensuring a wide view of customer activity, strong case management and powerful reporting to support decisions.

Centim, an integrated customer feedback and sentiment analysis solution, is available in South Africa through a partnership between Consulta Research and Clarabridge Inc.

Described as a first for South Africa, it allows businesses to gain customer insights not only from their existing stored data but also from real-time customer responses in call centres, social media (such as Twitter and Facebook platforms) and various customer feedback systems.

Traditionally, online customer reviews and social media feedback (known as unstructured data), which come from disparate sources, are challenging to categorise and analyse effectively for organisational decision-making.