Publicis Sapient

Customer Engagement & Customer Loyalty

Offering Summary

Reimagine your customer loyalty strategy by evolving your company’s ecosystem to meet the wants and needs of today’s consumers with a holistic, systematic approach that includes data, technology, and organizational enablers. Our Customer Loyalty service offering helps you build impactful, emotion-driven customer loyalty in multiple ways, such as personalized omnichannel connected experiences. These solutions enable you to unlock new business potential by advancing from, for example, a points program to a disruptive loyalty-driven customer engagement platform.

Solving Digital Transformation Challenges: Nurturing an Emotional Customer Connection

Loyalty programs have long existed and are now ubiquitous across consumer-facing companies, but the rapidly evolving expectations of today’s customers call for greater nurturing to deepen the relationship. When done well, these programs are valuable to customers and generate incremental revenue for brands. The challenge, however, lies in a brand’s ability to distinguish itself in a crowded field of competition and inspire true loyalty that moves the retention needle. The proof is in the data—customers are active in only about 50% of loyalty programs in which they are members.*

To overcome this challenge, brands must reconnect loyalty with overall strategy, gain senior leadership oversight, and address fragmented data and technology obstacles to build customer-centric, personalized experiences. By understanding customer segments and needs, businesses can create emotional loyalty through personalized experiences and ecosystems—not just transactional programs.

It’s time for a fundamental shift in the concept of loyalty as a marketing program toward true customer loyalty driven by value, experience, and connection.

Six Pillars of a Successful Loyalty Approach

Purpose & Vision: Create a vision that is true, relevant, and omnipresent across everything the brand says and does.
Emotionally Engaging: Propel customers to form emotional connections not just with the program, but also with the brand.
Customer-Value Exchange: Balance transactional and emotional loyalty; drive loyalty by appealing to the customer values that drive action with rewards and experiential benefits relevant to customers and their lifestyle.
Personalized & Omnichannel: Deliver real, orchestrated journeys across relevant physical and digital channels.
Actionable Customer Knowledge: Data-driven design and orchestrated journeys—know each customer: who they are, where they are in their journey, and how they feel, through individualized data (1P, 3P, etc.).
Surprisingly Simple & Transparent: Prioritize ease of use to engage with, take action, and understand.

*Source: Publicis Sapient Customer Loyalty Survey 2023 (Global)*

Where to Start—Our Approach to Customer Loyalty

Our team supports you by partnering to define your customer loyalty strategy and/or implement the required capabilities to achieve the strategic vision.

Strategy & Implementation

Strategy: Cross-capability team defines the business case and roadmap across our comprehensive framework and details key elements such as in-depth customer journeys, quick wins planning, and change management.
Implementation: Build out new data and tech capabilities and integrations, bring new customer experiences to life leveraging Agile development principles, and ensure value realization from the investment.

Key Outcomes

Business value potential defined, organizational alignment created, and implementation roadmap tied to value defined.
New capabilities enabled that will drive customer retention and deeper relationships with customers.

Customer Loyalty Strategy Approach

Define the Loyalty Strategy and Customer Value Proposition: What is the loyalty vision, strategy, and roadmap to maximize benefits?
Prioritize and Design Personalized Experiences: What are the customer journeys by segment that should be prioritized?
Set Out Target State Data and Analytics Capabilities: What are the incremental data and analytics requirements to enable the strategy?
Define the Technology Capabilities: What are the technology requirements and capabilities to enable the strategy?

Customer Loyalty Benefits

Increased customer lifetime value and revenue
Higher customer retention
Increased brand affinity
More efficient marketing spend
Coordinated omnichannel customer experiences

Publicis Sapient’s Full Suite of Customer Engagement Offerings

Our offerings tie directly into our Customer Loyalty solution and can set your company’s loyalty strategy up for success:

Customer Data Platform (CDP): Bring together all relevant data to create a unified view of the customer.
Data Monetization: Turn your first-party data from a cost center into a revenue-generating asset.
Digital Identity: Plan for a cookieless future by enhancing your data strategy to enable hyper-personalization across external and internal experiences with full journey data.
Personalization: Create richer, more meaningful connections with your customers by knowing them, anticipating their wants, and communicating with them across channels seamlessly.

What Sets Publicis Sapient Apart?

Move from a traditional outlook to a next-generation loyalty model with our loyalty proposition. We help shift your mindset from thinking about loyalty as a marketing program to true customer loyalty driven by value, experience, and connection.

We take a holistic, systematic approach to rethink loyalty beyond the traditional points program.
We enable brands to deliver personalized omnichannel experiences and build loyalty that directly leads to incremental earnings and customer lifetime value.
We have deep relationships with partners across the MarTech and loyalty ecosystem.
We bring cross-functional teams across Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data & AI to deliver integrated and comprehensive solutions, providing an end-to-end Loyalty solution bridging the gap from strategy to execution.
From strategy to design and build, we bring together the strength of the Publicis Groupe and its partner ecosystem to enable a holistic strategy, technology, and organization structure.

How We’ve Made an Impact

Global Travel and Hospitality Provider

The imperative for change:

The client sought to develop its next-generation loyalty program that brought together its full portfolio of 30+ brands and transform itself from a hotel company to the world’s favorite travel company.
The brand’s fragmented loyalty footprint across brands and new product offerings required a holistic approach to experience design, redemption, and marketing to achieve its ambition and business results.

The transformative solution:

Loyalty Experience Design: Digital experiences on a website across 30+ brands and partnerships; highly personalized experiences tailored to customer segments.
Loyalty Platform Build: Platform design and build for reward redemptions for new product offerings.
Loyalty Program Launch: Loyalty launch during the Oscars to drive broad awareness and engagement.
Loyalty Marketing & Media: Customer segmentation, CRM activation, and paid media to drive engagement.

The business impact:

359% increase in bookings year over year
85% improvement in display conversions
300% improvement in email engagement
140% increase in booking conversion year over year

Global Quick-Service Restaurant

The imperative for change:

The client sought loyalty to drive increased visits.
Their current program was not available on a mobile app.
They wanted to increase the efficiency of their offers and promotions.
Their goal was to improve engagement through personalization.

The transformative solution:

Produced a truly integrated strategy addressing supply chain technology and operating model.
Defined a customer experience (CX) transformation path enabling more connected ordering and service journeys.
Developed a process for customers to seamlessly enroll in a loyalty program via the mobile app.
Enabled users to check in at participating restaurants using a single code for their mobile rewards, offers, and orders.
Created focused offers on customer lifecycle value to incentivize critical behaviors.
Offered non-monetary rewards to generate perceived customer value without spending as much per consumer.

The business impact:

21M+ new loyalty members
118M loyalty transactions (a 5x lift)
4x increased revenue for subscribed customers

Large Drugstore Retailer

The imperative for change:

A disjointed and outdated customer experience across offerings and channels.
A complex, siloed organization lacking coordination across simultaneous customer initiatives.
A traditional IT organization and technical stack.
Competitors were disrupting a traditional convenience advantage.

The transformative solution:

Conducted comprehensive situation assessment to generate design hypotheses and outline capabilities and gaps.
Defined a ‘North Star’ platform business model that drove a redesign of their total customer experience.
Developed the business case and a rollout plan for the program.
Defined change management priorities to align the organization and deliver against the vision of the CEP program.
Ultimately migrated from strategy to execution to align the organization and deliver against the vision of the complex event processing (CEP) program.
Rationalized and integrated a program portfolio to drive consumers to the most valuable programs and centered them all around the retailer’s internal cash rewards currency.

The business impact:

$5 billion-plus incremental top-line growth opportunity
More than $1 billion in EBIT growth

Let's Connect

Jitender Batra
Managing Director
jitender.batra@publicissapient.com

Andre Engberts
VP Technology
andre.engberts@publicissapient.com

Mounir Aris
Senior Managing Director, MENA
mounir.aris@publicissapient.com

For more information, visit publicissapient.com/solutions.

Why Publicis Sapient

Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation company. We partner with global organizations to help them create and sustain a competitive advantage in a world that is increasingly digital. We operate through our expert SPEED capabilities: Strategy and Consulting, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data. Combined with our culture of curiosity and deep industry knowledge, this enables us to deliver meaningful impact to our clients’ businesses by reimagining the products and experiences their customers truly value. Our agile, data-driven approach equips our clients’ businesses for change, making digital the core of how they think and what they do. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe, with 20,000 people and over 50 offices worldwide. For more information, visit publicissapient.com.