Loyalty expert Nathalie Moolenschot joins us from Air New Zealand's Airpoints

We're very pleased to have Nathalie Moolenschot join our team from Air New Zealand Airpoints. We've known Nathalie for some time and she claims to have been through a 10 year job interview to join us as our Strategy & Rewards Services Director.

She has a history steeped in the best of New Zealand loyalty programmes. We first met Nathalie in the 1990's at Westpac where she worked on their hotpoints loyalty program (our client for the last 11 years). She moved over to their then new joint venture with the Red Sheds - The Warehouse Financial Services - and drove card acquisition (and we're fortunate to be able to count Warehouse Financial Services as a client since 2009) . She moved to BNZ to work on their loyalty programmes - Fly Buys and GlobalPlus (their partnership with Air New Zealand Airpoints). Finally she joined Air New Zealand where she launched the Fly Buys and Air New Zealand Airpoints partnership ( a world first).

Nathalie says “I’m excited to be working at the forefront of loyalty. With the continuous pressure on companies to achieve results, my role will be to make sure that we continue to help our existing and prospective clients develop effective and dynamic loyalty propositions to exceed those targets. I will also keep challenging the traditional loyalty program concepts with innovative solutions regardless of industry. This focus will also benefit our suppliers as we develop partnership models moving forward”.

She'll also be sharing here thoughts here on our blog.

Driving better returns from retention dollars

M1 Telecom - Singapore's smallest telco lost more customers this year than last year - 33% more customers to be precise (their customer churn rate increased from 1.2% per month to 1.6% per month). This on the back of a retention budget that increases 12% in 2008. Not the kind of result they were likely expecting.

Customer retention expenditure needs to be focused and disciplined. Sutowu of Carlson Marketing Asia Pacific has outlined a disciplined investment taxonomy for retention dollar investment.

Our man Sutowo is based in Singapore - he's responsible for our Decision Science Services in Singapore, Malaysia, India, Japan and Hong Kong.

Published in the Marketing Institute of Singapore's April journal issue, Sutowu's model relies on 3 pillars :

1. Customers need to be targeted at the right time
2. The right customers must be selected in the targeting
3. They must receive the right offer or value (which in our business is often driven through a loyalty programme)

All of this is underpinned by frequent Test and Learn programmes.

Sutowo's full article is available here.