In the day-to-day of our business at Achievement Awards Group, we talk quite a lot about behaviour change, and about how that is really what we do. Yes, we design engagement, incentive and loyalty programs, but the way those programs succeed is by changing people’s behaviour. That’s the heart of our business, and the result of it is more loyal employees, channel partners and customers.
The result of that loyalty, of course, is better performance for our clients, and ultimately more profit. So, to be more specific, we sometime say we’re in the business of profitable behaviour change. We have to be: our clients are businesses and they will only spend money with us if they see a return on their investment. We need to show our programs’ worth on our clients’ bottom lines.
But the deeper truth is that profit shouldn’t be the only end. Profitable behaviour change is relatively easy to achieve, but it can be achieved negatively – for example with sticks rather than carrots. And the problem there is, firstly, that it’s usually not sustainable, and, secondly, that it’s not desirable. After all, who wants resentful employees? And so what we actually prefer to talk about is positive behaviour change, which you can read more about in this article. Positive behaviour change leads to genuine loyalty.
And there are a few characteristics about genuine loyalty that are worth noting.
The first is that it is not fleeting or fickle. It’s long-term. It also doesn’t happen instantly or magically – it has to be built over time, with businesses doing a lot of things right. When businesses do do a lot of things right, their loyal employees, channel partners or customers will actually forgive the occasional wrong.
Fortunately, rather than just hoping for the best or randomly doing the odd nice thing, long-term loyalty can be built quite methodically, as we write about. This is especially relevant for channel partners, who play such a huge role in a business’ success (or failure). The relationship between you and your partners is strategic, and their loyalty to you should be approached strategically.
That is not to say it’s purely transactional. In fact, quite the opposite is true: real long-term loyalty is and must be emotional. It must be meaningful. There has to be some connection felt to keep an employee happy and engaged, to keep a channel partner motivated and advocating for you, and to keep a customer coming back, time and again, year after year. A loyal relationship that a customer has with your brand goes beyond simple feelings of liking, and at its best can even involve loving, the way some people love their cars so much they will only ever consider owning one brand. This, as you can read about, is when behaviour change has turned into behaviour constancy.
Along the way from meeting to liking to loving, businesses can be inviting, exciting, encouraging and even inspiring. How? By acknowledging and rewarding. Some rewards are small and given easily, others are large and given sparingly. Used together, these micro and macro rewards can bring mega returns – not just for a business, but for the people that matter most to it.
Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, contributions or questions about the articles in this issue of the Loyalty Lighthouse, please feel free to email andrews@awards.co.za.
