As mobile operators make the transition from a telco to a techco, loyalty and rewards programs play a vital role in accelerating this shift. Sharing his expertise within this field with Telecom Review, Related CEO, Rabih Farhat, highlighted the company’s successful projects in the region and elaborated on the importance of redefining a loyalty strategy for telcos.
Related was awarded the “Best Loyalty and Reward Program in the Telecom Industry” in accordance with Ooredoo’s Nojoom. What makes this loyalty program stand out among the rest?
Over the last couple of years, Related has been in the spotlight of the main loyalty exhibitions both regionally and internationally. And our latest prestigious award from Telecom Review for our client, Ooredoo, is another testament to our innovative approach and execution excellence.
Today, Ooredoo’s Nojoom program serves as a best practice benchmark for loyalty and rewards programs in the region and has achieved very high customer engagement rates and an impressive CSAT (the highest across all Ooredoo products). Nojoom’s success is driven by 4 main factors:
- Our ability to execute a digital transformation strategy to accelerate redemption on the online marketplace (80% of redemption is shifted to our marketplace).
- Our continuous improvement in our customer experience and interactions on all touchpoints (CSAT level reached a record score of 93%).
- Our offering of vast and appealing rewards and experiences that meet customer lifestyles and preferences (hyper-personalization of rewards with our breakthrough AI tools).
- The strategic partnerships we’ve built between Ooredoo and anchor/flagship brands in Kuwait to maximize customer benefits and increase loyalty (more than 300 partnerships across all industries).
How important is it to redefine the loyalty strategy of telcos in today’s digital-centric world? How does this aid in revenue generation?
While mobile operators are moving from telcos to techcos, loyalty and rewards programs play a vital role in accelerating this shift by incentivizing stakeholders to adopt new products and technologies, increase customer data points and insights, and create alternative currencies and payment methods.
At Related, we believe that loyalty and rewards programs not only serve as a form of retention but also serve as a revenue generation tool that helps telcos and techcos to create new revenue streams (3% to 5% incremental revenue) outside their core product offerings. This includes:
- Monetizing customer data through strategic partnerships with other brands.
- Creating freemium/ subscription-based loyalty programs.
- Gamifying user experiences and incentivizing cross-sell, up-sell purchases.
- Implementing a loyalty points selling structure.
In the Middle East, Related is working with several operators. Do you have any ongoing projects with operators that you’d like highlight?
We are impactfully working with more than 20 clients in the Middle East region alone and we’re immensely proud of our achievements with all of them. I’d like to focus on our most recent project, which has been particularly meaningful and challenging for us: ‘Eshret Omer’ from Asiacell—one of the leading telco operators in Iraq with more than 12 million subscribers. This is the first loyalty and rewards program in the market.
In a market where customers have limited access to e-commerce and payment solutions, we were able to digitally transform the existing program and make it a competitive tool for Asiacell. We have empowered the program with a reward marketplace that provides Asiacell’s customers with a palette of rewards, more than 200 online and offline merchants, and a seamless customer experience.
We are proud to say that today this program is the leader in the market and has created sustainable impact on Asiacell’s customer loyalty and satisfaction.
In your opinion, how crucial is a customer-driven rewards program to the success of telcos and techcos? How will Related continue to be a helping hand in this journey?
Over the last ten years, Related has been a data-driven company and our main focus has centered around elevating customer experience within the ICT industry, increasing customer lifetime value, creating new revenue streams and boosting customer satisfaction. I’ve always believed that innovation thrives at the intersection of vision and technology.
Knowing that telco operators are sitting on a bank of data (they haven't been very successful in recent years at monetizing this data or creating new product streams), we have been exploring these banks of data to design and deliver programs that answer customers’ needs.
We operate in a region where 65% of the population are below the age of 35, are tech savvy and have a big appetite for adopting the latest innovations.
Our programs are designed in a way to answer their needs:
- We adopt the latest trends to remain relevant to our audience (gamifications, blockchain, NFTs).
- We invest continuously in our AI module and tools to hyper-personalize rewards program experience and benefits.
- We offer a wide range of exclusive rewards from vouchers and gift cards to goods and memorable experiences.
- We improve customer experience through a trigger-based reward module across the customer journey.
How would you define a successful loyalty rewards program? Do you think more programs similar to Nojoom will thrive in the region?
A successful loyalty program is simply a program that answers the customer’s needs, improves their experience and makes them feel as though they belong. Although a big smile on a customer’s face or a repetitive purchase is enough to measure customer loyalty, quantifying these metrics is still essential to assess how loyalty initiatives impact a brand.
From our own experience in building brand loyalty, the key metrics to measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty encompass measuring customer enrolment and interactions with the program; measuring customer redemptions, CSAT and NPS; and analyzing customer lifetime value.
While Nojoom has set the bar high in customer loyalty, I believe that many programs in the region will tag along and revamp their program mechanisms and value propositions to maintain customer expectations and needs.
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