You’ve shutdown your venue, run out stock and powered-down your cold rooms. But have you considered how to manage your loyalty program during COVID-19?
Tiered loyalty programs have become an essential part of membership offerings. Once setup, they are often left chugging away in the background.
A well-designed program will help retain your most valuable customers, drive extra visitation and reward customers for their loyalty to your venue.
There are a variety of models you can use to setup your tiering. They all share one common feature: they have tiers based on ratings (sometimes called ratings points or status credits), earned at your venue over a period of time.
Most programs are based on either a three or six-month rolling period. In other words, the rewards level of a customer is based on their activity in the previous three or six months (plus the current month).
But what happens when gaming at your venue shuts down for four months?
Have you taken the steps necessary to pause your program?
Are you ready to re-activate your program and communicate with customers?
Here is our four-step plan to put your program on pause and successfully relaunch when you open.
1. Pause the expiry of points and ratings
Venues should contact their Licensed Monitoring Operator (LMO) to request a pause on the expiry of all points and ratings.
We have contacted Max and Odyssey and both have confirmed this will not happen automatically.
While the LMOs advise they honour requests from venues to pause points and endeavour to reach out to discuss options with their venues, if you haven’t already confirmed this request, you should do so immediately.
Read the full responses from Max & Odyssey.
If a pause was not applied before April 1, you will need to work through some more advanced options with your LMO to reverse this aging in a manner which will allow points/ratings to expire correctly.
2. Communicate to your customers
Keeping in regular communication with your customers during COVID-19 is essential.
Communications should include advice on your loyalty program and how you are protecting their benefits, for example:
We would like to reassure all customers that we have taken all necessary steps to protect your points and level in our rewards program.
During this time, expiry of all points and ratings will be paused. Your points and rewards level will be frozen until we re-open.
3. Request a temporary extension of expiry dates
Once a re-opening date for your venue has been confirmed (including your gaming operations), contact your LMO again to discuss reinstating the expiry of ratings with a temporary extension to the usual expiry period.
To be fair with your customers and keep your loyalty program tiers as consistent as possible, the extension should be at a minimum the number of months your venue was closed.
For example, if your venue closed on Sunday March 22 and re-opens on July 11, the minimum extension to your normal expiry for ratings would be four months. This accounts for the period your venue was closed, plus an extra eleven-day grace period for members. Depending on how restrictive the re-opening period is for your customers (plus restrictions prior to closure), you may consider extending this by an extra month.
Our recommendation is to extend expiry dates by five months. This effectively treats any ratings earned in the partial operating months of March and July as a bonus.
Regardless of the extension period you choose, it should remain in place for the number of months that your ratings expiry is normally set to. For example:
- If your ratings normally expire on a 3-month rolling period, the temporary extension to your ratings expiry should remain until the completion of your third full month of trading (implemented after EOM processing on November 1, 2020).
- If your ratings normally expire on a 6-month rolling period, the temporary extension to your ratings expiry should remain until the completion of your sixth full month of trading (implemented after EOM processing on February 1, 2021).
Shortly after re-opening, you should consider re-instating the rolling expiry for your rewards points. To provide customers a grace period, we recommend keeping the freeze on rewards points expiry in place for a couple of months post re-opening. After a few months of trading, when all customers have had the opportunity to visit your venue, you can re-activate your standard rolling expiry period.
4. Communicate these changes
Confused? You are not alone!
The workings of a loyalty program (particularly ratings) are complex. Throw in a COVID-19 closure and it is going to be a challenge to communicate this clearly to your customers.
The key is to start simple and focus on what the customers need to know. Communicate something like:
To help customers maintain their level in our rewards program, we have temporarily extended the period on which your rewards level is calculated. This extension will remain in place until November 1, 2020.
For customers that want more information, your management and key staff can then provide further details. Get them to put the extension into context with your closure period. For example:
The expiry date for ratings (which determine your rewards level) has been temporarily extended by the number of months that our venue was closed, plus a bonus month. As such:
- All members will remain in the level they were in when we closed
- No ratings will expire from when we closed until the August 1
- This extension will remain in place until November 1 (after four full months of trading).
Prepare for these difficult conversations. Your front-line staff should be briefed and given a basic understanding of the extension.
The key is for them to communicate the “generosity” of the club, by extending the periods beyond the time for which the club was closed.
GOOD LUCK!
