Adgully Exclusive | Helping the marketer to bridge the gap with loyalty: Accentiv's Ashok MS

Accentiv' India is a merger between SurfGold and Royal Images Direct”two of India's premier loyalty marketing companies. Today Accentiv is one of the largest incentive and loyalty solutions provider in the India. The company delivers solutions like channel loyalty, customer loyalty, employee recognition, incentive travel, analytics, creative etc.

As of now Accentiv has a value chain targeting 20 million channel partners, customers and employees through over 250 relationship marketing programs across 14 countries. Accentiv' has implemented loyalty and incentive programs for over 60 top multinational corporations from various industry verticals such as Banking & Insurance, IT, Retail, Logistics and more.

As the marketers today talk of better engagement and fulfillment we caught up with Ashok M.S. , Chief Operating Officer, Accentiv, to know more about how the loyalty industry has grown and what are some of the opportuntites for the industry.

Talking about Accentiv, Ashok says, "Accentiv basically looks at the loyalty and reward management program. We are pretty much an end-to-end solution. We have a structured process and something called as a Loyalty Engine which calculates the points and delivers it accurately to end customers."

Ashok has been in the space for nearly 12 years now and he recalls how in the early days there were only a handful of credit card companies that started off with reward services. "Back then oil companies were the first ones to start it and Shopper's Stop embarked in reatil sector which opened up the market for loyalty programs. And because now organised retail is evolving into a very major category loyalty programs are now going to become a requisitive. Moreover because media have split itself into so many channels reaching out to the end customer has become a challenge and loyalty programs are helping to bridge the gap," Ashok adds.

Foreseeing some of the trends across the space, he says, "One of the important things that will happen is a large number of retailers,brands and large number of other service providers today have a national presence. So all of them today are willing to spend their money on loyalty programs because it helps maximise your ROI. In next few years you will find that many of the brands who have a very similar target customer base will join hands and launch a collaborative program. Furthermore which will allow the customers to accumulate points across a wide variety of preferred categories and thus also giving it a look of a customised or personalised offering."

Technology has been a big enabler for Accentiv in its working, and Ashok believes that in the past the more customers one had to deal with the cost of communication always went up. "Now with technological advancement and mobile penetration going up substantially we can send specific snippets to a mobile phone and especially to a specific customer at a time. Due to restrictions on mobile marketing solutions' intrusive drawback, when a customer is enrolled into a loyalty program, brands and companies can reach the customer directly without any hassles," he adds.

Talking about the emerging markets in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, Ashok says, "The retail chains and brands have entered this smaller markets in a big way and what is happening is they are finding a better traction with the younger consumers in these markets. These young consumers will value the loyalty schemes more than the urban consumers and hence it gives better traction for the brands trying to reach to them."

Accentiv is currently very strong in the banking space and has clients like Citibank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank and in the IT space with clients like HP, Microsoft etc. "One sector which will definetly open up is the Telecom sector. With Mobile Number Portability (MNP) coming in customer loyalty programs to retain your customers will be an important factor that Telecom operators will look into. Banking will get more competitive," he adds.

Ashok points out that Employee Recognition and Rewards will be an area that Accentiv will concentrate majorly in 2011. "Indian consumer is the most discerning consumer in the world. You cannot fool an Indian consumer and they are able to calculate what is the return on a loyalty program. And if they are not happy with the whole experience at the outlet and believe that the loyalty program is not upto the mark, they will reject it very quickly," he adds. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]