Q&A: Ben Stirling, Managing Director, Webloyalty
Webloyalty’s market-leading reward platforms deliver customer value through a breadth of relevant rewards and shopping benefits while generating secondary revenue for businesses. By making customer interactions more rewarding and valuable, they encourage loyal behaviours and increase the value and frequency of their transactions for their partners.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
We help companies meet their financial goals by making their customer interactions more valuable. We do this with an incentive cycle; by using action, time and value-based cashback incentives to influence customer behaviour, while also providing our partners with a valuable referral commission.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
We offer a wide range of solutions from turnkey to tailored, online to in-store, partners trust us to target the right incentive, to the right customers at the right time.
Whether partners choose a simple add-on solution or a deeper level of integration, we work seamlessly within online retail businesses, and start earning those businesses additional revenue in as little as 30 minutes.
We measure success with a balance between meeting customer objectives and business goals. i.e. our API can turn cashback into a personalised partner incentive that triggers behaviour and rewards the customer, driving repeat transactions and customer satisfaction.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like?
We enable partners to create commercial incentives that are not commercially viable without our partnership. We turn customer commission into incentives that margin alone can’t cover. This enables them to create personal offers that drive more valuable behaviour.
Our turnkey solution is our ready-to-go rewards platform that drives secondary revenue from the retailer’s confirmation page.
Our White Label solution enables partners to adopt any of our customer engagement solutions as their own – connecting their customers across all touchpoints from online to in-store, locally and overseas, with one seamlessly and consistently branded experience.
Our Bespoke API solutions enable our partners to offer their own rewards programme as an extension of their business, powered by Webloyalty. Using a tailored approach, partners can optimise their customer’s experience to achieve even better outcomes.
What advantage does it add?
We make customer experience and service a priority for our partners enabling them to reward their customers with both value and breadth, providing a platform that stimulates loyalty and drives ancillary revenue.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2020 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2020?
Had you asked me a month ago, the core challenge was meeting fast fashion demands while remaining focused on the demands of climate change. The digitally connected consumers are primed to comparison shop with price and social conscience in mind, making it difficult to drive repeat purchases and on-going customer engagement. For retail successes such as Boohoo and ASOS to remain relevant and popular they will need to address this issue.
Fast forward to today and my answer is very different (unsurprisingly!). The challenges placed upon the retail sector by Covid-19 are unprecedented and for many may end up being devastating, therefore I am going to focus my attention on the good.
One of the overwhelming messages I have taken is that community is still very much alive and well. From a work colleague who had to cancel his son’s birthday party and still had people coming to their window to sing his son Happy Birthday, to musician Frank Turner who has (so far) performed 2 live gigs from his front room via Facebook with donations being made to support his touring staff unable to earn during this time.
Why do I mention this? Because I still firmly believe that the High Street is at the heart of the community. Short term, there is an opportunity to bring people together online in a style like the Netflix browser plugin that allows people to watch shows together as if they are in the same room. Think about how to get a group of friends who would usually be going to the high street together setup with video and audio access, able to share screens and browse the internet together – offering real time feedback on clothes people are looking at. Similar to a retail version of Microsoft Teams or Zoom.
Longer term, as we are social animals, I hope we will see a resurgence to the High Street as people go back to those activities en masse after the long period of absence we look to face. This is the opportunity that retail needs to be able to embrace and prepare for. Shoppers should feel rewarded for their loyal behaviour, by encouraging smarter shopping decisions we’re helping customers feel valued. How can retailers make their stores the destination for consumers returning from isolation – what offers and experiences can drive this long awaited resurgence?
This would be the time for the long talked about Omni Channel dream of connecting the online and offline experiences to become a reality.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
We believe that our insight into consumer behaviour will play a highly valuable role in helping merchants/brands understand their customers in more detail by combining historical transactional data with intent. We have the capability to use this data to personalise what content, rewards and offers we present to who and when. Building a clear picture on what customers are interested in and what drives their behaviour, will enable brands to close the gap and increase the value exchange between customer and merchant.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
We are excited to see the increase in online orders over the next few months. This will ultimately move offline retailers online and allow retailers to expose and fix any ecommerce inefficiencies. As more retailers grow and adapt to the perfect online presence, when the dust settles these online stores will need more visibility as a result of competition and having spent their budget perfecting their platform. This may turn the market into a visibility bidding war – we make visibility more commercially viable and make sure there are consumer incentives to drive repeat purchases.
Company name and location: Webloyalty, 2 Harewood Place, Mayfair, W1S 1BX
Key contact: Ben Stirling, Managing Director
Links: Website / LinkedIn / Twitter
