Behind the Brand®

Jeff Adamson [00:00:05] Welcome to Behind the Brand presented by Neo. We take an inside look at the leaders behind today’s most influential brands. I’m your host, Jeff Adamson. As co-founder of Neo Financial and SkipTheDishes, I’m fascinated by what it takes to build great companies.
On this podcast, we’ll learn from leaders that are reimagining, transforming, and innovating in the financial and retail industries across Canada. Let’s get going!

I'm excited to introduce Oren Eizenman, partner at McKinsey. Prior to joining McKinsey, Oren headlined as a professional hockey player, playing for the Israeli national team and winning gold in the world championships, not once, but twice. After playing hockey for four years in North America in the AHL and ECHL, he played for two years in the Asia League Ice Hockey and eventually retired in 2013 and joined McKinsey shortly after. Now leading the loyalty service line at McKinsey, Oren is an expert on designing, optimizing, and building on top of existing loyalty programs and works with clients across industries on their growth and marketing strategies. He has published or co-published several articles on these topics and works closely with some of the largest organizations in Canada and around the world.

I'm really interested in the beginnings of your career as an athlete before starting at McKinsey. Is it safe for me to say that you're big in Japan?

Oren Eizenman [00:01:30] [Laughs] Physically, I was large in Japan. Popularity wise, I wouldn't call myself big in Japan.

Jeff [00:01:36] You know, like a pop music group where you're just like a celebrity in Japan, and you come back to North America and you're like, “What the heck?”

Oren [00:01:41] I think it was actually on my Twitter at one point. It was like “I'm big in Japan”, when I was playing there. The journey from an athletic standpoint is a really interesting one because like most Canadians, when I was growing up, it was just, [I] played sports, right? And for me, I never actually really thought of athletics as anything but fun with friends and only later was it something that I took seriously. You know, hockey wasn't really a serious thing for me, but when I went down to the U.S. on scholarship and then started playing professionally afterwards, it was living the dream, right? Like that was always my dream.

I would say the journey through that actually teaches you a lot that goes into business too. Doing things the right way, not the easy way. I think it goes hand-in-hand and I think sometimes a lot of people tend to think, oh, you know, you can only be successful in one area of your life and either be good at sports or you can be smart or you can be artistic or you name it, right? But I actually think there's so much that permeates across those borders.

Jeff [00:02:47] Were you thinking of it strategically where you're like, I'm going to just focus everything on hockey for this stage of my life and then once I'm kind of done with this stage, I'm just going to try to transfer everything I've learned into education and my career. Or were you trying to excel at academics and hockey at the exact same time?

Oren [00:03:08] When I said “Hockey is going to be my thing?”, I was committed to hockey. I mean, I was 100% focused. Luckily, my family, my dad especially, reminded me that statistically that's a really stupid thing to do. Because, you know, you could be amazing at hockey, but if you look at the sheer statistics of how many people make a living at hockey, how many people get a scholarship to the U.S. to play hockey, how many people make a living after that? It's minuscule. So as much as I wanted to focus entirely on hockey, I couldn't.

Although I will say when I was a professional hockey player, what I realized is I was starting to be drawn to other things, right? So I started a charity, HP4K, which is just basically Hockey Players for Kids, and it was getting hockey players out in their communities to really do reading programs, you know, all sorts of things. And I found I got a lot of enjoyment out of that and I probably didn't expect to be drawn back into that because I thought when I turned into a professional hockey player, I could singularly focus on that but there was something drawing me back to maybe the more academic and business side.

Jeff [00:04:16] I remember when I was on the National Wrestling Team, there was other folks on the team where their entire life was the sport. Like do you find that that in some ways detracts from your ability to succeed in the sense that knowing that you have something else that you could fall back on? Like you’re a partner at McKinsey now, so presumably you're fairly smart. So like you knew that if this whole hockey thing didn't work out, you probably could support yourself. But there's other folks where it's like, if they're not doing this sport, what the heck are they going to do? But then they also know that they need to make it.

Oren [00:04:47] I was always wrestling in my mind, no pun intended.

Jeff [00:04:51] [Laughs] Thanks, thanks for that one!

Oren [00:04:52] Yeah [laughs]. I was always, in the back of my mind, had that doubt where “Am I really devoting myself like others are?” Because I could always rationalize and I would always rationalize and say to myself “Well, if hockey doesn't work out, well then at least I've got a good education and I think I could probably do something to make a living. Whereas people I played with, who from the age of 15 or 16, they were very focused. There were players I played with that yes, they graduated high school, but it was sort of like begrudgingly graduating high school, never thought of going to university. I don't think it was because [of] any sort of intellectual capacity, because a lot of them were extremely smart people, but they just focused on hockey since they were so young and so for them it was almost like that was it. They didn't know anything else.

I think my exposure through university and through my family especially, it's okay if it doesn't work out. And I always thought maybe that was a negative for me, but I actually think it's overall a positive because I'm almost 40 and almost nobody plays in the NHL or professional hockey until they're 40. And so you sort of, when you get a little distance from it, you realize that a little bit of balance is probably a good thing.

How was it for you? You know, in your wrestling years.

Jeff [00:06:06] It was similar. Like there was folks [where] that was all they had and there was no balance at all. But for me, I think, yeah, you start getting drawn to other things and I think maybe it's like a growing up thing where you start weighing things where you're like, “Okay, well, the probability of me making the next Olympics, what does that look like? What are my other options? You know, I got a good career. I would love to start a family”, and all those things, that pull starts becoming stronger and stronger and stronger and you start feeling like the sacrifice is growing and growing and growing. And so that's kind of how I felt. But I'm curious to know, like, how many years did you play hockey for?

Oren [00:06:41] Professionally, I played for six years.

Jeff [00:06:42] But just in general, like.

Oren [00:06:43] Oh, just in general. Oh, I started when I was four and a half, five years old, and I played all the way until I was 28, so…

Jeff [00:06:49] So like 23, 24 years.

Oren [00:06:51] Yeah, something like that. I still play, like I love playing hockey. You know, I think a lot of former athletes will say that they don't love the sport that they played anymore. I'm actually the opposite, I love playing hockey. Any opportunity I get right now, I will go out and play men's league.

Jeff [00:07:08] 23, 24 years of doing something, and I think that this is something that a lot of people can relate to, where there's that feeling that you need to make a transition. But then there's that fear about, kind of, what's next and making that leap and I think you've made the transition quite well. I mean, you went from pro hockey to an engagement manager at McKinsey and then, you know, now to a partner. When you're looking back at it now, what do you think you did well? What advice would you have for other people as they're thinking about making [a] large transition? Like that's a big change.

Oren [00:07:37] Oh yeah. To further that, I had lived two years in Asia and so the change could not have been more different. I remember when I was thinking about, should I make the change? Should I not make the change? It was a very, very difficult decision. It was just the fear of the unknown. Hockey was something that I knew, like I was very comfortable in a professional dressing room. I didn't think that I would be very comfortable in a professional boardroom. I was very, very nervous about this.

What I will say is I was extremely excited by the prospect of joining McKinsey and working on difficult problems, doing things that challenged me mentally. I thought now is a good time to sort of turn the page. But of course, when you have to actually make that decision, it was almost overwhelming. And my wife now, she was my girlfriend, back then, her and I had a lot of conversations about it and talking it through helped. I have to say, nothing prepared me for the transition. I think I was just extremely fortunate in that, really two things.

One, is that McKinsey was so supportive. I always tell people, I came into McKinsey, I was coming in at a huge, I don't know if disadvantage, but I didn't have the skills that a lot of people do have. And I knew that I needed to quickly develop those. And so McKinsey was extremely supportive of my development journey.

And then I think the second thing was there were actually or there are actually a lot of parallels between team sports and McKinsey, and those parallels are not obvious but, you know, anyone who's played a team sport, you know that you're sort of all in it together, right? You're definitely sort of going through the grind together. McKinsey is very team oriented. And so that team aspect, I think, made me feel very comfortable and also made me realize that if I made a mistake that was okay, one of my teammates was there to cover for me. McKinsey was like that as well.

And so I think those two things helped make me more comfortable, but I didn't know that before I joined. And so I remember showing up on day one and thinking to myself, what is going to happen? Like this is, this could not be more foreign.

Jeff [00:09:56] Like you played at such a high level too, that working hard towards something where the stakes are really high in a team environment, even if it's really difficult, is actually a lot of fun.

Oren [00:10:04] I think this is something that you’ve probably experienced more than maybe anyone. You've obviously had to start things, right? Where I think starting things is the ultimate challenge, like building something from scratch. You stare at a blank page and then something has to be created. But I think that feeling of working with a team towards a bigger goal, and especially when it's one that people doubt or others outside of the team, are like, Yeah, we don't think you've got that. I think there's something special about that. And I think back at all of the most meaningful situations in my career so far, whether they were in hockey or at McKinsey, the tougher and more outrageous, sort of, it seemed, the more I remember it and the more I look back on it fondly and say, this was an amazing time in my life where I learned a lot and I have some memories and people who are who I really value and it sort of sticks out.

Jeff [00:11:01] Tell me a bit about your role at McKinsey, because I think that a lot of people will look at management consulting and kind of say, “Hey, it's just like you’re a management consultant”, kind of like, end of sentence. But you specialize in loyalty. So what does that mean? What does that role look like?

Oren [00:11:13] Loyalty is that perfect mix of art and science because it has to do with customer behavior, incentivizing people to behave in a different way, while also the extremely analytical component of, you know, we can offer this or we can offer that. It has to make dollars and cents. I spend most of my time designing, optimizing, building businesses on top of loyalty. And it's just for me, it's what I was drawn to right from the start. Luckily, I've been able to work with some of the largest loyalty programs in the world and in Canada.

Jeff [00:11:47] How should people be thinking of loyalty? I see it all the time at Neo. It's so crazy to me how different one company will be thinking about it to the other company. Is there a universal way of thinking about it? And how do you see it?

Oren [00:11:59] I would say there are universal trends in loyalty. Those work across industries, they work across companies. But companies shouldn't build copycat loyalty programs because what works for one company and what works for another company will be different. That's because every company has different customers. Every customer thinks of companies differently, and every company really needs to build on their strategic assets in order to create a meaningful loyalty program. Otherwise, what you end up with is a bunch of loyalty programs that are exactly the same, and so they don't actually work because there's no differentiation and you're not going to choose to go to one company versus another because of it. While, yes, there are fundamental things that I think permeate across all loyalty programs. I think how they manifest themselves is really very individual.

Jeff [00:12:56] I’ve got to know then, what are those fundamental truths that you see cut across industries and brands?

Oren [00:13:02] Loyalty is evolving. I think we all know that, but I don't know that everyone really realizes how much it's evolving. If you think back ten years ago and you think back to a loyalty program, you basically think of carrying a card in your wallet, right? Like a physical card in your wallet, where you would just swipe it at the till and you would then get some sort of points that you would redeem somewhere. And it was basically a transaction, right? It was like, it was a discount. What we've seen is that the evolution of loyalty has been to get not just transactions now, but also engagement. And that engagement usually comes in the form of experiences and it comes in the form of community-based benefits. Transaction and monetary benefits we're seeing are still extremely important, and no one doubts that that's an important piece of loyalty. But we're also seeing on top of that, there's engagement benefits in the form of experiences and those experiences can be additional things, but it can also be unlocking a pain point that is really hampering a customer journey and community-based benefits, because what we're seeing is that now loyalty programs can be real connectors. They can let someone know that, hey, there are other people who are interested in the same things as you, interested in the same brands as you, and you might actually want to connect with them because sharing those experiences with that community is a real source of benefit that a customer or a member will get out of it.

Jeff [00:14:38] I want to challenge you on something there Oren, because I always hear the words ‘engagement’ and ‘community’ come up in topics or discussion around loyalty. And I feel like it's one of those things that's so easy to say, so difficult to do. I'm sure there's people listening where they're like, “Yeah, my VP of Marketing or Loyalty is saying that, Hey, we need to drive engagement.” And then it's like, “Yeah, that's easy to say. But then like, how do you get a customer to engage with you consistently as their expectations are so rapidly evolving?”

Oren [00:15:04] Therein lies the rub. It's. A very, very common thing to say, “Oh, we need to increase engagement.” And that's not just with loyalty. I would say, you know, anytime you talk to someone about digital, they'll always say, “Oh, well, engagement, that's the number one priority.” Loyalty is interesting because loyalty gives you the right to engage with a customer, right? A customer who joins a loyalty program clearly finds value in something that that loyalty program is offering. And so the first step has already been taken when someone joins the loyalty program. From there on, you now have access to that customer. They've said, “Yes, you can contact me” because now most programs are digital. And so they've said, “Here's a channel that you can use to contact me”, whether it's their email, whether it's an app that they've downloaded, whatever it might be. Now it's up to the organization to find what are those triggers, what are those things that I'm interested in to actually make me engage?

And I would say there's an infinite number of ways that loyalty programs can do it, but a few that I think are really, really top of mind are there's a lot of gamification that gets built on loyalty. And so that gamification, it can be as simple as giving someone a leaderboard or a scoreboard of watching your points go up, right? That engages someone they see “Oh, wow. Like I just collected ten points or I just collected 100 points and now I can use those points to get this” Or it says, “Oh, in another 50 more points and I get to this.” And it gives people that aspiration. It gives people that engagement that they crave to see, “Wow, okay, I'm making progress.” Everybody loves making progress and it plays on very primal things.

The other thing I would say is this is especially true when it comes to products that are maybe longer-cycle like a grocery store. You might go once a week, but there are a lot of products that people buy, there are a lot of services that people procure that might be year-to-year buying cycles. And so how does a brand stay top of mind? And this is where we're seeing a lot of engagement come from, things like partnerships, things like dedicated offers of peripheral or auxiliary services. The more we personalize those things, the more we understand about our loyalty members, the more likely we are to get that engagement.

And so when people say “engagement”, I agree with you, it's too broad, right? And what we need to do is drill down and say, “What type of engagement are we actually looking for? And then how do we create that?” Because now that we know that someone's interested in our program or in our brand, it's on the organization to really find out what those meaningful touchpoints are.

Jeff [00:18:02] Do you think that there's a, almost a company culture aspect of loyalty as well? Like it when I think about it, it's like, here's all the things we need to do in order to have a highly engaged loyalty program. Now we actually have to go and do those things. But if you have a company of unengaged employees, you know, you may fall over on the actual execution of the program. Like when you think about it, is there an aspect of some of the work you do where you're like, we need teams and the people who are going to build this and execute actually give a damn about it, or else the customers will know that you're not living up to your loyalty promise.

Oren [00:18:33] I think it's actually the least talked about thing with loyalty. It has to permeate through every level of the organization. The execution of loyalty is difficult, but it has to be seamless and perfect. You have to have your digital and tech teams working so that they know exactly what the loyalty program needs and they're able to build it. And when things break, repair it quickly.

But by the same token, if you're a business to consumer company and you have front line workers that are there and they're the face of your brand, they need to live the ideals of the loyalty program as well. And they need to understand it, understand what the benefit to the customer is, and be able to explain it, because otherwise they are going to be faced with questions that they can't answer. When something goes wrong on a loyalty program, the first people that get asked those questions are those people who are on the front lines and dealing with the customers every day. And so if they don't know about the program, they're not users of the program and they can't explain to them, then it just seems disingenuous. It seems like this is a program that comes from up in the sky that the brand doesn't really care about. And customers notice that, customers are very perceptive.

Jeff [00:19:51] It's like living your values, like there's some companies that you go into their store, I think Lululemon does it quite well where you go in and their employees wear the clothes, their employees live kind of the lifestyle. But when you think of program design, are you designing it for your most loyal and your power-users? Or are you designing it for the masses? You know that, the 80% or the 20%?

Oren [00:20:12] This is a constant struggle in loyalty because, you know, especially with a lot of the traditional powerhouse loyalty industries like travel, when you're talking about…

Jeff [00:20:22] Yeah, business travel.

Oren [00:20:23] The airline programs, 20% is very generous, right? They might be going after 5% or the top 10% because that's where so much of their value is created. The constant struggle is, do you build a loyalty program for that top echelon of your guests who are the most loyal and spend the most with you? And you just need to increase that by a little bit. Or do you build it for the masses? There's no right answer because every industry will be different.

But what I will say is the best loyalty programs now are not saying either or. They're building in the flexibility to be able to serve all of their customers. So the way I think about it is a bull's eye. And their bull's eye might be that top 20%, but then the next layer out might be that 40 to 60%, and then it goes on. And the key is when you build in flexibility to a program, it feels more personalized and it feels more relevant to a larger percentage of your population. And that will allow someone to grab onto some feature, some benefit of your program and say, “That's why I do it. That's what matters to me.” And I think, especially as programs mature and they start to sort of get better at understanding each segment of their customers, that's the way they should head in terms of giving that flexibility so that I might use the program very differently than the way you use it. But we both love the program.

Jeff [00:21:57] Yeah, you have different goals for different segments, you know, because what's right for your 5% might not be right for someone who's at the bottom 5%.

Oren [00:22:06] Yeah. And the truth is, they're going to want very different things. If I'm a frequent flyer, the thing that might be the most important to me is getting to the airport and not having to wait in any lines. If I'm the person who flies once a year and it's always with my family, my…

Jeff [00:22:23] You also don’t want to wait in lines when you’ve got two kids in tow?

Oren [00:22:26] [Laughs] I probably don't want to wait in line, but maybe the most important thing is that my checked baggage is free because I have to fly with three car seats and, you know, whatever else. So the way that different people will interact with loyalty programs is critical because not only is it something that makes sense for the company to do, but it's also from a customer perspective, it's the only thing that's going to make me engage with it. It's going to be different than what makes other people engage with it.

Jeff [00:22:54] We've been talking a lot about winning the loyalty battle with the customer, but I feel like there's a lot of people who might be listening and they're just trying to win the loyalty battle internally. When you think about getting a loyalty program off the ground, what have you seen successful in bringing the right people to the table? Assigning the right people to drive it? What advice would you have for people who are thinking “Hey, we either need to launch a new program or we need to completely torch our existing program and rebuild it again.” How do you win the internal battle of loyalty before it even gets to a customer?

Oren [00:23:28] I deal a lot with these internal battles because you also have different parts of organizations that think about loyalty very differently. You have generally a marketing organization that thinks of loyalty as a marketing vehicle. You might have a merchant organization that thinks of loyalty as a cost, and you might have a finance organization that doesn't actually know where to put loyalty because they're just trying to make dollars and cents of what's actually driving what and that can be really difficult.

Loyalty is done best when it's a collaboration. Where you have a marketing component to it, you have a finance component to it, you have a digital and technology component to it, and certainly you have a sort of core business strategy component to it. Because if your loyalty program isn't tied to your strategy, then no matter how well you design it and how slick the interface is, it's not actually going to drive what you want it to drive. And so the way that I've found to win the loyalty battle is actually through data. There's so much that we don't know about why customers behave the way we behave, and loyalty helps shed some light on that.

I talk often about how it is probably the number one source of truth for an organization to understand how they are doing with their most important customers. When I say most important customers, I mean actually the customers that are already in your doors. It's very expensive to go out and get more customers. Getting customers is way, way harder than keeping customers. But if you don't have any way of understanding the customers that are already in your four walls, across all the different channels, then you are going to put yourself at a disadvantage, and that's a recipe for disruption. And with customers being less and less naturally loyal, it's more important that organizations understand their customers and keep them happy and keep those experiences really, really engaging and positive. And I think loyalty is the lifeblood of that journey.

Jeff [00:25:38] It's much better to know what's going on with the customers that are keeping the lights on than it is to be constantly obsessing about the ones that are out there and you don't know anything about yet. But this battle between in-house loyalty and coalition, how should brands be thinking about that decision?

Oren [00:25:54] It's a decision, especially in Canada, people face all the time because we have some very strong coalitions in Canada. We have some of the oldest loyalty programs here. And so you have coalitions that people have become accustomed to and you have very strong loyalty programs that people become accustomed to.

As an organization, there are a lot of things that you have to consider when considering, should I go it alone or should I join a coalition? One of those things is data. A big question mark for a lot of organizations is, can I obtain more data myself? Let's say I have 100,000 customers. Is it better for me to obtain first party data on those hundred thousand customers, or is it better for me to tap into a larger pool of data in a coalition where I might not own the data, but I might be able to get access to it and use it to make my business better?

Now, I think the dream for everyone is that a lot of organizations want to build their own version of coalition programs, and we see [that] basically everywhere in Canada where partnerships are really forming, right? Esso and PC Optimum, is a really good example of that. But also Air Canada and Starbucks and Air Canada and Uber. We're seeing some of those partnerships which really are mini coalitions. Why that is important is because it not only gives parties 1P-data, because that's important to be able to identify your customer and know what they're doing. But now it's giving them 2P-data, which is taking someone else's data that is also part of your data ecosystem.

When we start to see that, I think everyone wants to build a coalition, but I think not everyone has the customer relationship to build a coalition. So when assessing where someone should go, you know, it's important to be realistic about “What is my brand? What is my customer value proposition? And do I think that I'm better served joining a coalition or going it on my own and trying to get my customers to join just mine for a maybe more narrow value proposition, but potentially more valuable?”

Jeff [00:28:03] The two examples are you used PC and Aeroplan both have anchor financial services built into those programs. What's the role that financial services should play within loyalty?

Oren [00:28:14] So you're touching on another trend. Yeah, financial services and loyalty are starting to go hand-in-hand. It's no secret. Even before this became a trend, we had seen this in many instances, right? Like PC Optimum is a great example, but Canadian Tire is a great example too, where so often loyalty is linked with credit cards. In Canada, it's been something where we have become used to it, where we've had retailers have financial arms. But at the same time a more common practice is to have co-brand relationships. Those are growing in popularity because what people are realizing on all sides is that it's more rewarding for the customer. It's a great incentive driver for the retailers or whatever consumer company it is. The banks and the financial services providers are finding that they can actually drive a lot of spend through their channels. When I think [about] what role does financial services and payments specifically play in loyalty, I think it's going to become one in the same thing because transactions form a very core part of any loyalty program. Having that transaction and that loyalty interaction be seamless is so critical. And so the utopia for everyone is on everything that I spend, I don't have to think about it and I'm collecting my points that are valuable to me. There is some of that going on, but as, especially payments and loyalty become more integrated, we're going to start seeing that more and more.

Jeff [00:29:46] Where do you see loyalty heading? Trends are changing, expectations are changing so rapidly. What are the emerging trends that brands should be aware of and how do brands future-proof their programs? Or is it foolhardy to even try?

Oren [00:30:01] There are a lot of places loyalty is going. I think one of them is, it's going digital. Physical loyalty is a thing of the past. This digital revolution in loyalty is not just spurning on the loyalty evolution, but it's also helping the digital revolution. It is the reason why a lot of people get a certain app, is because they can be rewarded.

So maybe the first one is, it's going digital. I think the second one is, it's going broader. No longer are you seeing that the top loyalty programs are happy playing in their little sandbox. They want to expand. They want to be part of something bigger. They want to have more customer journeys in their purview than they did in the past. Some of that is through them developing new products and services. But a lot of it is related to the third trend, which is partnerships.

And when I say partnerships, I mean loyalty based partnerships. We're seeing it across the board and this is something that we had seen elsewhere in the world, in Latin America, as well as Asia. But now we're starting to see that in Canada, where loyalty based partnerships are so critical. They're very difficult to execute. But when done right, they are extremely valuable.

And maybe the last thing that we're seeing is this idea of data. Everyone is so concerned, rightfully so, about how their data is treated now. And consumers are starting to realize that they want to, A) interact with brands that they trust, and B) they want to be rewarded for giving their data. They know that their data is valuable. They should be rewarded for it. And so loyalty programs now become such an integral part of the data ecosystem, because as we get into stricter data privacy laws, as organizations aren't able to track people's movement across the Internet, we are entering a new way of interacting, of the way organizations interact with customers. That has to be based on some knowledge, and that knowledge comes very often from loyalty. So I think data is such an important evolution in the way organizations and people will think about loyalty.

Jeff [00:32:32] You raised a good point around data, and I think our instinctive reaction around data privacy is that customers don't want anyone to know their data. And I don't know if that's necessarily the case because to your point, I think they know that it's valuable and they want value in exchange for it. I think, what we're seeing [is] customers were giving up all their data to companies like Facebook and then over time, they just realized like, “Okay, well, now I'm just getting served more and more ads, my whole feed is just ads. I feel like I'm getting kind of the raw end of this deal now. I just want more value.” And then, you know, maybe some of these brands have kind of capped the value that they can give the customer based on the data that they're providing. Is that how you think about it or do you see it differently?

Oren [00:33:09] That's very in line. I think in all the research we launched, we say there's always a question about, “Are you worried about how organizations use your data?” And 80% of respondents say yes to that. But then we also ask the question of, “Would you give your data to get better personalized experiences?” And 80% say yes to that.

So I think there's this real dichotomy of people want, knowing that they need to protect their data, knowing all the risks that are out there and wanting trusted brands, but also realizing that there's value in it. If done right, they actually enjoy an interaction where a company can personalize an experience to them. And I think with that, they're also realizing that there's real value. Me, as a consumer, if I'm going to choose where to interact digitally or in person, I want to make sure that I'm getting the value that I know is coming out of that.

Jeff [00:34:06] On the future-proofing side, I think it's an interesting time right now, Oren, because we see this where, yes, it's all digital. The physical side is, if not fully dead, it's dying quickly. But we're also having to support both instances. Like, for example, in financial services, cheque deposits, some people still get cheques. Now it's probably 99% less than it was a decade ago, but you still need to support some of this legacy functionality. So then if you're, the risk is that if you come up with a modern loyalty program that you're appealing to kind of Gen-Z’s and Millennials, but then maybe Gen-X and Boomers are now kind of left out. Supporting both of them is very expensive because you have all these legacy features that maybe less and less people want. So how do you think about that?

Oren [00:34:49] What we tend to see is also some of your most loyal members of any program are those sort of legacy members that you definitely don't want to alienate. And so oftentimes what we see is a transitional phase, which is likely more expensive for the organization, but it ensures that you're not alienating anyone, but you're still able to build the future. And I think there's a really important point here of, there's also something to say. Companies really need to work to help people who are hesitant to go digital or any new technology get them over that hump. Because what we have found is [that] satisfaction scores are much better when there's a holistic experience that can work for every part of your customer base. And, you know, whether that's getting them to adopt digital or anything else, we do find that the juice is worth the squeeze at the end of the day to try to get them into sort of that new behavior.

Jeff [00:36:00] Well, or and I think we solved it. We solved loyalty during this conversation here. I don't know what you think.

Oren [00:36:06] [Laughs] Yeah, I think so too. The only thing I'll say, the one thing I didn't answer that you asked was about can organizations future-proof their program? And the truth is, I don't think that in one fell swoop you can future-proof your program. I think the way to future-proof your program is by creating a mechanism by which you are constantly evolving your program, because there's no way that anyone can keep up with the pace of change from consumers. And so making sure that you're not just resting on what you have and saying, “Oh, this is good enough”, you just need to constantly innovate and evolve.

Jeff [00:36:43] That's well said. Wrapping up here, where should people learn more about you?

Oren [00:36:48] On LinkedIn is always a good way. Twitter is a great way to do it, although I don't post anything, I like to read on Twitter but yeah. Longtime listener, first time caller.

I think the best way, I've written a number of articles on these topics. If people are interested in the topics that we were just chatting about, look for those articles. They're not just informative, but they also give a way to contact me at the bottom of them.

Jeff [00:37:14] We'll put a link in the description to those. Oren, super grateful for you coming on and sharing your experiences. I know I learned a lot, I hope our listeners did too. Thank you so much.

Oren [00:37:28] Jeff, it was an absolute pleasure.

Jeff [00:37:35] Thank you for tuning into Behind the Brand presented by Neo. If you enjoyed today's show and are interested in learning about Neo for Business or our customer products, visit us at neofinancial.com. And don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, so you never miss an episode.