Improving brand engagement through human-centered loyalty technology
When we applied a human-centered approach to development of ICF Next’s loyalty technology platform, we saw huge benefits. Your customers can, too.
I’m lucky to lead a team that is at the top of its field. For the past decade our loyalty group has been named a leader by independent research firms. Innovative and standout clients have validated those assessments with the type and scale of assignments they’ve awarded us. And we’ve been recognized across the industry for our ability to deliver impactful results.
Our clients have evolved to meet the increasingly complex and demanding loyalty and customer landscape, and so have we. As ICF Next, our focus on behavioral insight, creativity, and technology-forward solutions are helping clients overcome barriers and take advantage of the breakneck pace of change—rather than be disrupted by it.
Which is why it is both rewarding and validating for ICF to have been named a leader by Forrester Research, this time in their newly published The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Technology Platforms, Q2 2019.
Enhancing customer participation improves loyalty
As our field changes, we hear a lot about “experiences.” But it’s easy to call basically anything an experience, and it’s a lot harder to actually deliver meaningful human engagement. In the loyalty space, we could feel this too. And it’s why we’re focused on bringing the foundational elements of loyal, human relationships to every brand-customer interaction.
Our Tally® loyalty platform team applied this human-centric lens to the platform roadmap and feature development process. Working with our client partners, we centered planning efforts around our core platform user groups: marketers, program operations and members. The results? Well, they speak for themselves. We took an already great product and made it even better.
“Tally…is positioned to drive emotional and behavioral brand loyalty through personalized interactions…” – The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Technology Platforms, Q2 2019
We improved our user experience, a criterion in which Forrester gave us the highest score possible and noted that our "interface is intuitive." We also developed a variety of features that enable meaningful, personalized interactions between the program and the member. Forrester “especially liked” the feature that injects prompts and customer insights into our Customer Care application.
These features and many others are all part of a planful approach to develop a variety of tools that simplify the development of meaningful human connections between members and programs and to make it easier than ever to focus on their customers’ experience. We received the highest score possible from Forrester in the vision and planned enhancements criteria. And our clients can already feel the difference, with one specifically noting to Forrester that with Tally, they “can think of our customers instead of worrying about the platform.”
We’re proud to be a leader in this space but we know our work is never done. We’re committed to helping our clients deepen their relationships with their customers and members and can’t wait to show the future innovations our team is already hard at work on. Onward!