The Loyalty Technologist aspires to inspire engagement with the loyal community through technology. We live in the technological age, where change happen exponentially. Moore’s Law puts paid to the idea of exponential growth, which still has no signs of slowing down.
So what does this mean to the technological space? It means that processing power is still growing. I am old enough to remember the days when processing power was measured in kilohertz (kHz), RAM in kilobytes (kb), and my first PC had a whopping 8 megabytes (MB) capacity. Of course, people of my vintage will remember the zip-zapping sound of the floppy disks and the incessant sound of the 52kbps modems which got you connected to the internet.
In contrast, loyalty programmes have also evolved from being stamp-based (literally) from the 1800s to the surge of Frequent Flier Programmes of the 1900s to the more engaging loyalty programmes of the 2000s. Gamification is the way forward, however there is also a risk of over-engineering these programmes. What makes loyalty works is engagement, which needs to be balanced to ensure the customers are not lost in the jungle of programme rules.
I will dive into the following areas in the next posts:
- History of loyalty
- Loyalty of the 1900s
- Loyalty of the early 2000s
- Loyalty in the next 15 years
- Gamification
R6.