Loyalty isn’t a new concept. It’s been around for years, driving consumer choices and affinity for much longer than any of us have been marketers. But it hasn’t been until very recently that the technology, tools, and capabilities have existed to create loyalty experiences that keep pace with marketers’ boundless creativity — or, for that matter, consumers’ increasingly high expectations. 

With the right technology, you can now craft personalized experiences at enterprise-scale that drive one-to-one relationships with consumers. You can effectively predict their behaviors and target them before a decision is ever made. You can encourage brand advocacy, deliver in-the-moment offers, and immerse your audience in your brand story in such a way that they’ll never actively seek to do business with a competitor. 

But marketers can do none of this without the right loyalty technology and partnership. 

Forrester Research just evaluated the 13 most significant loyalty technology platforms in The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Technology Platforms, Q2 2019 report. Our loyalty solution, Cheetah Loyalty, was named a leader. We received the highest score possible in 13 criteria. Here are five areas that matter when choosing your loyalty platform.

Member data management

We all know that data is the foundation of a modern technology platform. According to the report, our customers are “very satisfied with the platform’s current capabilities — especially its segmentation and member data management capabilities.” Looking closer, there are three reasons why we think our data management capabilities stood out: 

1. Legacy, experience, and expertise
   With over two decades of experience with managing customer data and over 600 marketing experts on our professional services teams, we understand how to drive loyalty programs and ensure success. And our expertise is broader than just technology — we have in-house services experts who truly understand loyalty strategy, our platform, program execution, and how to make the most of every data insight available, directly enhancing our clients’ abilities to succeed.
    
2. Real-time customer profile
   We help our clients collect data from any source in real time, ensuring their profiles are always up-to-date with the latest customer, engagement, and transactional data. We then organize that data in meaningful and easy-to-use ways. With our drag-and-drop segmentation and actionable member dashboard, marketers can easily activate their data and take action based on observed behaviors and activities.
    
3. Infinitely flexible
   While many loyalty programs have elements in common, brands are unique. They want their loyalty programs to reflect their culture and story, but rigid platforms force their customers into predefined structures. With Cheetah Loyalty’s flexible data management capabilities, our clients can configure unique ways to track and manage member data, behaviors, and activities. We can extend our data model to meet the needs of our customers and, most importantly, every data point can be leveraged for segmentation.

User experience

Working within a loyalty platform shouldn’t be hard — and we’ve done everything to ensure Cheetah Loyalty is as intuitive and easy-to-use as possible. We have the technology maturity, features, and functionality needed to ensure marketers can drive unique customer experiences and measurable results. But simply driving results isn’t enough if the process is clunky, arduous, or — at its worst — causes undue headaches. 

We prioritize easy, flexible program management, putting our clients’ experiences at the forefront of our development efforts. No matter the program complexity, we ensure marketers can quickly set up and manage targeted and personalized promotions, offers, and challenges — creating a continuous loop of customer engagement that promotes brand loyalty, excitement, and, ultimately, increased revenue. 

Privacy and security

You’ve probably heard it before — Cheetah Digital is dedicated to marketers. A part of this dedication means we take the precautions, proactive steps, and ongoing efforts needed to protect your customers’ personal data. As a steward of your customers' data, it goes without saying that we are very proud to receive the highest score possible in — what I believe — to be one of the most important criterion in the entire report: privacy and security. 

We have best in class enterprise security measures in place that keep our clients’ customer data private and protect it from any nefarious activities, including fraud. Our single tenant deployment guarantees data isolation while achieving application and infrastructure security. We take privacy and security seriously and so should marketers when evaluating a marketing partner. 

Scalability and reliability

Just three of the 13 participants, Cheetah Digital included, received the highest score possible in this criterion. When it comes to creating lasting relationships with customers, reliability is key. Cheetah Loyalty was engineered to be highly available and resilient, leveraging the latest technologies and adopting all the best practices in cloud computing. We ensure our clients always have the ability to execute their strategies and deliver the world-class experiences their customers expect. 

The same applies for spikes in volume — speed to service is paramount when customer demand suddenly increases. Through elastic scaling, our system automatically reacts to this demand, ensuring we can flawlessly support important events without ever interrupting your client or customer experience.  

Customer retention and satisfaction

Our clients’ satisfaction with our loyalty platform and partnership is, perhaps, the greatest honor of all our top scores. We believe it is directly correlated to our ability to deliver on other criteria the report examined and ranked Cheetah Loyalty in. With the knowledge that our clients believe our platform “does many things well in one connected package,” we can concentrate on innovation to enhance this sentiment and better help our clients succeed. This score, in particular, is not one we take for granted. We are and always will be a great partner and an extension to our clients’ teams. 

We’re always working to create solutions that serve marketers and deliver results. Serving marketers to the best of our ability has always been our goal, and our placement in the Forrester Wave report is, in our opinion, an affirmation that our efforts are resonating with our clients. We are excited to continue innovating and improving our loyalty solutions to ensure those who trust us to help build loyalty are always able to not just meet their goals, but exceed them. Want to learn more about our placement as a leader? Check out the report here.