The Logic Group Blog

Well as usual, I attended PCI London this week, which is probably my fourth or fifth one over the years. As always it was very well attended, which was encouraging as it demonstrates that merchants, schemes and service providers continue to treat security seriously, even in these difficult times.

It has been interesting to see the changes in approach.

Initially at my first one, the event had an educational bias. “What is PCI DSS, who does it impact, what does it mean?”

Then it moved to a more supplier centric focus, with many presentations talking about technology and solutions which would allow a merchant to meet a variety of controls within the standard.

Recently I saw an example of a business using social media to provide outstanding customer service and enhance its brand image. The Dutch airline KLM presented gifts to customers who had mentioned KLM to the world via Twitter prior to boarding the flight. These customers seemed pleasantly surprised that KLM airport staff not only knew they had tweeted, but also knew their interests and the type of gift they would like. They knew all of this because they had a team of people monitoring social network feeds for mentions of their brand. They then looked up the social network profile of these brand advocates to establish their interests, purchased the gifts and presented them to the customer within hours of the tweet or facebook post. The fitness enthusiast was more than pleased to receive a GPS heart rate monitor watch, and the music aficionado an iTunes voucher. One would assume this then lead to more tweets about the “KLM Surprise”, and a very happy customer who would most likely pick KLM as their airline of choice in the future. So, for KLM, mission accomplished. A happy, loyal customer and free positive PR for the brand.

Our latest research for The Logic Group shows that, of those of us who are members of loyalty schemes, an impressive 69% are satisfied with them and only 5% dissatisfied.

What the research also finds is that the British consumer is a contrary creature who at once accepts the rewards that loyalty schemes bestow on them, while rejecting the mechanisms that make these rewards useful.

So the question remains: will consumers ever be happy with loyalty schemes?

Like many people out there, I stood on my bathroom scales a few days after Christmas, and after pushing my belly to one side in order to read the dial, decided that this year has got to be the year that I do something about shifting those excess pounds. Yes I’d promised myself in previous years that I would lose weight and get fitter, but never really got round to it, always finding other ‘More Important’ things to concentrate on. But this year I simply have to act.

I wonder how many IT Directors or Heads of Finance are wondering the same sort of thing regarding PCI compliance? Having put it off for a few years in the hope it will just ‘Go away’, this year may just be the year they decide to face this challenge head on.

It’s a daunting prospect, and whilst for me, there is no more frightening word in the English Language than the word ‘Diet’ many business leaders may feel the same way about the word ‘Audit’.

So how do I go about it?

It’s not news that the advent of technologies such as social media has given the brands that we use unprecedented access to our lives.  Gone are the days when our only contact with a brand was on the high street.  These days they are emailing us, texting us, writing to us (but only if we’re ‘old school’) and even ‘reaching out’ to us via social media.

And many of us have happily jumped on the bandwagon, joining, for example, the Facebook groups of our favourite brands.  For instance, at the time of writing, 408,959 of us ‘like’ Marks & Spencers’ Facebook site, and 74,692 of us ‘like’ Debenhams.  We get to know more about the brand and its products, and if we’re lucky we get some useful discounts and offers for the products we like.  Most of us know that the trade-off for these ‘perks’ is the brand knowing more about who we are, and what kind of products/brands we like.   Brands that engage with us in this way are effectively offering financial incentives to gain greater proximity to our lives.