In mature markets where service providers have shifted their primary focus from customer acquisition to profitability, increasing customer loyalty is paramount and viewed as a precursor to increasing revenue and ARPU. Service providers across the global are creating creative loyalty and affinity programs to increase “stickiness” and improve the customer satisfaction and brand perception.

Loyalty programs are limited only by the creative of the service provider’s marketing organization, but generally utilize a common set of infrastructure capabilities. Examples of loyalty program features include:

Increase Lifetime Subscriber Value

Loyalty and affinity programs are proven to decrease churn rates for pre-paid, hybrid and contract subscribers. By segmenting and profiling their subscriber base, service providers can identify the situations that place subscribers at-risk and design programs that limit drive loyalty at the critical time in the subscriber lifecycle. For example, a service provider might identify that pre-paid users are most at risk prior to the first top-up after the initial purchase and usage of a phone. To overcome this challenge, a program that provides a 25 percent bonus or a free bundle of usage with the first top-up could be implemented.

Improve Customer Satisfaction and Brand Perception

Subscribers have many choices today and, in today’s competitive marketplace, they want to be valued by the service provider. The simply truth for marketers today is that happy subscribers rarely discuss their satisfaction, but frustrated customers share their experiences far and wide. Message boards and blogs are filled with postings to this nature. Whether being asked to pay full price for a phone upgrade after years of service or seeing a promotional offer for a new service that only applies to new subscribers – these situations impact churn rates and brand perception. They are also easily overcome with simple loyalty programs that reward your highest value subscribers for their tenure and usage.

Stimulate New Service Usage

As service providers deploy an every-growing array of new services and products, high-value subscribers are the first opportunity for driving adoption. By combining loyalty programs with new service introductions, marketers can achieve two objectives with one tactic. Offering three free months of service to subscribers based on tenure or past service usage will both drive loyalty of those subscribers and increase adoption of the new service offering.

Simple and Speedy Program Deployment

Marketers face a number of challenges in quickly and easily deploying and improving loyalty programs. First among them is simply gaining visibility into subscriber profile and usage information in order to identify new program opportunities; deploying programs that automatically rather than manually add and remove subscribers based on real-time evaluation of subscriber usage relative to program requirements; gaining visibility into loyalty program activity to improve programs over time; incorporating program and service usage information to personalize proactive subscriber communications and customer care interactions.