Mobile apps are the way we will interact with all of our loyalty programs in the digital age. Smartphone apps can do so much more than a piece of plastic or punchcard could have ever imagined, yet so many companies have built half-baked, poorly thought out attempts at creating a customer experience. But the good news is there are some leaders that are nailing it.
The 4 qualities a mobile app should possess are:
A mechanism to capture transactions
At the heart of the mobile experience should be the mechanism to capture data about the customer. This data should feed into the loyalty program of the brand. This should come in the form of transactional, interests, surveys and geo location data. Data is the building block for a loyalty program to succeed.
Frictionless transactions
A mobile app has the ability to eliminate the frictions of the transaction. For example, at an Apple Store the customer can enter the store, open the app, scan the item they would like to purchase and then leave the store, all without having to interact with a human or wait in line. That is eliminating friction.
A mechanism to communicate with your customers
Mobile is a channel. It is perhaps the most important channel in the new digital marketing era. The phone is always on your customers body and that will soon include wearables. The ability to push messages to your customers through this channel is extremely important. The ability for your customer to open the app and see their loyalty program details makes communicating with your customer more personal than ever before. This includes beacon support to guide the customer through the offline experience as well. This should be the channel that receives the most focus in the coming years.
An engaging experience without a transaction
Mobile apps hold a space on the customers phone. If you make your app engaging, even when the customer is not making a transaction with you, you may keep a good position on the phone. Think of it as search rankings, the more prominent position, the more engagement with your brand. Get stuck in a folder on the third page, you will only be utilized as a mechanism for transactions which is not the worst thing in the world, but doesn't drive behavior.
Starbucks has been on the forefront in the mobile app space since it introduced its mobile app in 2011. Starbucks took the approach of creating an app that engages customers when not in a Starbucks, along with making the transaction process frictionless. Starbucks has long partnered with Apple by giving away free music and apps, but they also moved this functionality to the app. By doing this, Starbucks has been able to engage their customers with their application outside of the brick and mortar stores. I consistently look at my badges from Starbucks to see what free apps or music they are giving away this week. Most of the time I don't get the freebies because they are not to my liking, but every once in awhile I do. But it also has trained me to constantly go to the app. I check my points and how far away I am for a free award and I am not even a big free award kind of a guy.
Starbucks has also made a frictionless payment process that also tracks my behavior. I always received gift cards from Starbucks and had them strewn all over the place. Some made it to the wallet, some were in drawers, but they were never consolidated. Starbucks also had a loyalty program that was tied into a gift card, but it was confusing on how to interact with the program when I wasn't using that particular gift card. Plus having to manually add money to the specific gift card was far from frictionless. So I never really used the loyalty program and I was going to Starbucks less. The app has removed all of this friction. It is easy to transfer gift card money to the main loyalty account, which was a main pain point for me. It also allowed for easy addition of funds into the card through the app. These two items made using the program much easier.
The other app that I have been very impressed with is the Chipotle app. This app is a little different from the Starbucks app because it is just solving one problem, waiting in line. The app allows you to place a Chipotle order and skip the line to pick it up at a designated time. Now I don't know if any of you have been in a Chipotle and have to wait in the line to order, but it could be a fifteen minute exercise in browsing Twitter. The app saves your favorites and recents so it takes approximately 20 seconds to place an order. Pay online, just walk to the cashier and they hand you your bag of goodness and you are off. Simple, frictionless and awesome.
Improvements can be made in both of these apps to include more of the 4 qualities. The Starbucks app nails 3 out of the 4, but can do a better job at using the app as a personal, targeted channel. Right now the offers they have are not very tailored to my experience. This is a big opportunity to make the app even more engaging. For Chipotle, they only possess 1 out of the 4. They might be monitoring my transactions, but they don't have a loyalty program tied to the app, so I am not sure. The app is a great start, but they could hit a home run with the addition of some functionality. Either way, I will still use it weekly to avoid the lines.