Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
Emotion vs. Metrics: The True Currency of Customer Loyalty
What Really Builds Customer Loyalty? A Conversation with Hope Neiman of Tillster
Loyalty programs are everywhere—but actual customer loyalty is harder to come by. In this episode, Hope Neiman, CMO at Tillster, offers a grounded look at what separates transactional perks from meaningful, lasting relationships.
While many brands rely on points and promotions, Hope argues that the real drivers of loyalty are often more personal and human: a service rep who remembers your dog’s name, a solution offered before a problem escalates, or just the sense that a brand actually knows who you are. These small gestures, she explains, often do more than elaborate programs ever could.
We also explore new research on QSR loyalty behavior, including some surprising stats—like the 22% of regular diners who don’t use any loyalty apps, or the more than half who have stopped visiting restaurants due to impersonal experiences. Even operational friction—like something as simple as a blocked parking lot—can quietly erode loyalty.
Hope also walks us through how Tillster is using data and AI to rethink incentives—not as mass promotions, but as tools to offer more relevant, achievable rewards based on real customer behavior.
At its core, this conversation is a reminder: as technology advances, the emotional side of customer relationships isn’t going away. If anything, it’s becoming more essential.
I like to describe loyalty you sort of said it a little differently as loyalty with a big L, that everybody has loyalty programs, which today is table stakes. But it really is about how do you create a loyal customer. And what people forget about is there are metrics and there's emotion, and you have to be able to play to both of those. You want a consumer to affiliate with your brand and you want to be able to use the tools to say hey, we're here, don't forget about us, and we love you.
Speaker 2:Customer engagement is so much more than just a transaction. We all know that. But you know, think about the last time you were served by somebody in a retail environment a QSR restaurant or a hotel, anything you can think of where that person took the time to acknowledge you genuinely hear what you had to say about that acknowledgement. You know your response and what it meant to you in the transaction and I you know it all boils down to me as like, what does that mean to customer relationships? But the truth is it's just basic humanity that's right.
Speaker 1:And especially, you know, think, think about it, even when it's more important, when it's not a visual presence. So think about what has happened to customer service when you place a phone call, or even how you do something on a live chat. So there's a company that I buy dog food from called Ollie and great stuff, but it's very much what you're talking about. You get on with them and they, you know, you see a little picture of the person, their animal is shown there. They know that my two dogs are Gus and Stella. When I get on and they see my thing and they talk about well, is this for Gus or Stella?
Speaker 1:And it is those really small things that make a meaningful difference rather than the no that tends to get said across it. And also on the customer service front, which is just hospitality, generally many brands don't allow their customer service agents or anyone who deals with the public enough latitude. It's relatively small to say, yeah, go ahead, we'll give you this for free. But that person will now go and tell so many wow, it was so easy to deal with them, as opposed to oh my God, I wasted 30 minutes on hold and then 45 minutes trying to make the person understand what was wrong and then arguing with them as to what I wanted to happen. Those sorts of experiences really are big differentiators Huge.
Speaker 2:And you know, I mean it's one of those big truisms in customer service that there's really no neutral outcome. It's either it was good and you get dividends out of that, or it wasn't good and there are different kinds of dividends, but there's there's almost never a neutral outcome from a customer service experience, so you have a choice to make because you're not going to. There's just just no middle ground there.
Speaker 1:And you know it's funny because everybody's gotten very smart about how to use social media to broadcast out and they are far more eager to broadcast to people how bad the experience was. One of the things that we do and that we work with our customers to do is we'll have customers that'll say how come my app rating is 3.4? And people love us. They tell us they love it. It's like because you're not incentivizing them. And incentivizing does not mean giving them something. It means being smart about who you ask and when you ask to write that review or to say something wonderful. And we have transitioned a lot of customers from those very low as low as 2.4 up to like 4.7.
Speaker 2:Can we break that down a little bit, because I think what you said is just really, really important, because context is almost everything in those kinds of situations. So how do you approach that? I mean, what's the secret sauce? What's the Hope Nieman method?
Speaker 1:So part of what we do is again by putting a lot of tools that are all about engagement onto an application. It gives you a lot of intelligence that you can automate and use AI against in order to cause those prompts to come up. So I might say that my average customer comes once a month. Just hypothetically and maybe what you say is okay to every customer who has come three consecutive months, at least once a month, and ordered more than X dollars worth of product and is a registered user, you're going to, at that third visit, send them a push notification that comes up, perhaps depending where you learn is the best place to put it in the order and say we hope you're loving us. We know that we love you.
Speaker 1:Prompt something that is very personalized and say would it be okay for you to rate us? If, to the contrary, you have a customer who's experienced a problem or who says no, and you put another prompt that says tell us more about that. We want to be able to get to you about what the best way to do this is that also in a very positive way is taking what was a negative experience and turn it into something that you can now use where that guest will come back and say oh yeah, I'm going to go ahead and rate you. Well, you solved my problem. You cared to know what my problem was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no-transcript that phrase from a zombie. Then there's a little bit more human interaction there, because we don't speak like we write and that kind, and it all comes from this kind of spontaneous understanding of how we communicate in language and those subtleties. And they're really hard to get down in an AI kind of model, but those subtleties are incredibly important.
Speaker 1:What I love about what you just said and it's true even on the whole AI front, when we look at what gets written, which doesn't necessarily feel genuine in the process to doing that is people tend to write and hit send and they don't step back and say does this have more than one meaning or how's somebody going to take this, depending on what their mindset is when they do that and a lot of the AI posting, which is very vanilla, feels that way, versus being able to inject things that spark emotion, that spark something that gets you to want to read further or engage further in what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm listening to you and the way you're explaining this and I'm thinking of one of my recent interactions with. It might've been Siri, but it was one of the voice activated things out there, yeah, and I asked it a question. It gave me an answer. And I asked it a follow-up question. It gave me another answer. So I was informed, I got the information, but I was anything but engaged.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:I'm talking to you, I'm interested in what you're saying, but I'm interested in how you're saying it. I mean, we're going down a long dogleg here, but I think, as communicators, we understand that 90%, or whatever the exact percentage is, of communication is nonverbal and whatever that big chunk is, it's a big, big chunk and in the chat-based AI world you really don't get those opportunities to layer in emotionality and context. Well, context yes, but you can't tell, uh, how I'm feeling.
Speaker 2:Actually, that's not even true anymore, but I I mean I've seen models now that can detect my sentiment, which is a scary thing. So it's coming down the pike, but I don't think it's here yet.
Speaker 1:Actually I re. I heard a podcast the other day from the New York times that was all about a woman who had. This is bordering on. Do we really want to go here? She developed a relationship with her chatbot that even turned into the equivalent of sexting and it had trained it and it became almost an addiction for her. But one of the things that was pointed out is how hard to get those other emotional even those if you really read it and read what came back to her. She was putting her own mindset on it. It wasn't that it spoke to her in a way that is like a real person, and we've talked a lot internally about where we can use AI to polish writing or to take and do a first pass. But you have to understand it's only a first pass.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Because it's allowing you to get the details much like what you were saying about fact, fact but it's not allowing you to get somebody to remember what you said or take notice or move on to something further, and that's really what all of us do on a daily basis for work. We hope has that kind of potential impact across it.
Speaker 2:Right, or where you were putting the emphasis in your words like how animated were you? How important is this? It goes beyond just the what you're saying and everything to do with how you're saying it.
Speaker 1:You know it's interesting.
Speaker 1:One of the things that you and I talked about last week was around loyalty, and I went back and looked at some of the data that we had in terms of which was even worse than I recall that in terms of the number of loyalty applications people have and how they engage with it, in terms of how they feel about those apps.
Speaker 1:And what I came to realize mainly because I talk about loyalty a lot internally or with our customers is that it's table stakes. But table stakes is just the basics. Yeah, you're going to do your card and you'll do it when you're there, but you're not thinking about oh, I should start thinking about my next visit, or look how close I am, or look what I get, or look what's different. It's just check the box, and that, by making all of those programs so generic in their approach or so non-personalized, it's very reminiscent to me of which is now gone by the wayside of when Bed Bath Beyond had their 20% off coupons. Would you ever have gone into a Bed Bath Beyond without a stack of coupons to be able to use, because they did allow you to stack them?
Speaker 2:But the funny thing was, if you did, if you were the one person in line who forgot your coupons, they'd say hang on a second, I've got one right here for you. Yeah, and I mean, there's exactly a certain amount of goodwill they're building up with that, but but it's just a race to the bottom in terms of discounting.
Speaker 1:That's right, that's exactly right, and and not something that motivated you like, wow, I need to go to Bed Bath Beyond because of this. It's the other way around oh, I need this, it's there, and oh, I have those 20% off coupons, so I'll just take them. That doesn't build a relationship with me as to why I should be so devoted to them versus going to Target or Walmart or some other beddings, going to Bloomingdale's or Macy's, I mean depending on what I have to buy. And that's part of the reason. I'm guessing they declared bankruptcy and did it because what consumers expect today is continuing to that bar is rising everywhere, not just, you know, for us in restaurant or in a retail environment, but everywhere.
Speaker 2:Every single sector and I think you could say you know almost without exception, every developing developed country in the world, country in the world.
Speaker 2:We participate every year in a survey that measures customer expectations on a category by category basis, and it's a really neat survey. What we do is we work with a group called Brand Keys and they measure the ideal situation, the ideal brand and all of its attributes for a certain category. If you're looking at buying shoes no betting, because we were just talking about it they map out exactly like what's the best it could be, what do you really want out of that situation? And that becomes the ideal. And then what they do is they go to the other brands in that category, year after year, category by category, to the point where you know after a couple of years of if a brand's kind of increasing their ability to meet expectations somewhat, but the expectations are rising faster than brands can keep up. At some point there's this big difference in there. That's an opportunity for somebody to go wait. All I need to do is close the gap.
Speaker 1:That's right. I mean, you know it's interesting. Look at somebody like Patagonia or LL Bean who will take back something, no matter how long you've had it, and I don't know how many people actually return items at those brands, but the idea that that promise is there says a lot about okay, I know I'm going to pay a little bit more for this Patagonia item, but it's going to last me. It's not going to be something I'm going to throw away in two years or that's. You know whatever is going to happen to it.
Speaker 1:And so there is an expectation about caring even beyond in their case, talking about the environment or the other values that they tend to live by and I find that always very interesting that they've achieved something. That is very different than going to the bottom, as you said before, because the flip side of going to the bottom is everybody's on Amazon and there are a bazillion brands you've never heard of. But if it's something really practical, do you want to just see what it is that's there and buy it? If it's nothing, and if it's meant to be disposable in some way, or a brand that you buy look, it's cheaper here, I'll just get it, it'll come to my house, but when it comes to things that matter, do you really want to do it there or not, and that's an important consideration.
Speaker 2:I kind of just want to let that question hang in the air for a minute and just let everybody kind of consider it, because it's if you think about your own life situation, the things that you need to buy groceries, whatever other commodity type purchases you're going to make. But beyond that you can go to Amazon and get just about anything you want out there. But do you really want to? Are there brands out there that would cause you to not go and click the Amazon button? And whatever the emotional components of that decision would be are really worth paying attention to? I wanted to just kind of turn this conversation a little bit. I know that Tilster does a lot of work in the QSR space. Yep, kind of turn this conversation a little bit.
Speaker 2:I know that Tilster does a lot of work in the QSR space and QSR space is really interesting from a loyalty standpoint because, yes, there are certain people who will go. I only go here because that's my thing, but that's a fairly small component. I think I don't have the data to back that up. It's just a gut feel which is worth nothing. But that leaves a lot of room for brands in the QSR space to figure out engagement. So how do you go about that at Tilster? What's your roadmap for doing that?
Speaker 1:Well, one of the things that we do that's different than others as well is we look at and not that all of our customers take all of the different platforms or tool sets that we do but we have an understanding of the entire restaurant ecosystem. So there are people who come to the restaurant, there are people who order for delivery, there are people who order for pickup, you have kiosk users, you have mobile app users and in the old days it used to be all of those people were different, but because we have tools across them, we also have a means of connecting the dots, so we can see what drives consumers to do that. One of the reasons that we have a consumer data platform that's part of all of our pieces, even to check for an anonymized user at a kiosk is to better understand how people are using multiple dispositions today, which is very prevalent. They still want to have a shared experience.
Speaker 1:So sometimes I want delivery and sometimes I want pickup and sometimes I want to be in the restaurant, but I want a similar experience. I want you to take my loyalty with me everywhere. I want to take my offers. If you're sending me coupons, I want to take those with me, no matter what I'm using, and that is not incidental to people. In fact, people are walking away. They're realizing that the personalization experience is not as effective as they would like, and so, as a result, better than 50% of the people today are saying they've left a restaurant because it wasn't personalized to their liking, which, to us, was a shocking revelation when we did some.
Speaker 1:That's a big number, it's a big number and they're willing to go ahead and say I got lots of other choices over here. You know, I've been in a variety of industries in my life and we found that there were kind of two classes of people. And the same thing is very true in QSR. Everybody says, oh, give me the best deal. Oh, I have this coupon. The coupon makes you walk across the street for that visit. But if you're going to make it much more convenient for me to pick up a pickup order, that's going to warm me over. So I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1:In this research we did, do you know that over 30% of people who tried to do a pickup order couldn't even get into the parking lot? So you look at things like curbside or all the rest of it. It's great, they tell you where to park, but if you can't even get into the parking lot, what good is it? If, when you get there, there are people that are parked there, that are shopping in the spaces that are supposed to be there? You're not going to pick this brand anymore. So, understanding and using things like okay, let's geofence it, we know you're here. Maybe we message you and say hey, we know it's really busy today, we will bring it out to you. Those are things that are like wow, why would I go to anywhere else to save 50 cents when I've now saved the aggravation of going ahead and doing that? That's gold.
Speaker 1:And that's total gold. And it's one of the things even about loyalty programs. We talked about loyalty a little bit ago Shocker Ransom research earlier this year. How many loyalty apps do you have on your phone? Do you have any idea how many the average person would have?
Speaker 2:Like for QSR, for QSR, for QSR, gosh, I'm going to say average person.
Speaker 1:Four, Okay, but you're pretty good. I would have bet it to be higher, but here's where it's astounding 22% zero. These are among people that consider themselves QSR visitors that go a minimum of once a month. Zero on 22%. 43% have between one and three Okay.
Speaker 1:So, you guessed a little high. Between zero and three, that's two-thirds of the people, and then four to six is another 20% or so, with the remaining people having more than that. But the fact of the matter is, if loyalty is considered table stakes, build a program that's motivating Most. If you and it's different between a Starbucks or a Dunkin' where you go every day or three or four times a week that's great. You're cycling through. You're earning something. It's interesting now that Starbucks has made their program a little more transparent In the past. It would be great. You're earning points.
Speaker 1:How do I even use these? Nobody even knew you would ask people. It's like I don't know, but I have all these points. But what's different about more of a QSR is that they don't. Even more of a QSR is that they don't even. Many of them are non-customers. Don't even think about how many visits does the average person have to come to earn something? Because if I don't earn something or have a message that's related to that, I forget about it. All it is is points sitting there. And oh, by the way, when I come back in six months, you might have already balanced out my points. So now I'm angry about something that you use to do that, so it's operated in a very different way. So we'll use things like AI clustering to be able to look at when is somebody likely to rotate off? Or, better yet, if I know that you only come Mike comes only for his own meals and I may go to pick up for my whole family If I'm going to send you an offer to come back, I'm not going to send you something that spend $30 because that's not reachable.
Speaker 1:But if I know that you're going to come back, you may spend normally $12, so I'll send you an offer for $15. Wow, that's achievable. I can go Now. I have a reason to go back and visit before it goes away. I may get an offer. If you sent me something for $15 and I'm buying for a family of four, that's just giving away money. Versus my average check that may be $35 and it's telling me I have to spend 40 or $42. Now there's just enough of a reach. You're paying for the program. You have somebody feeling good about it being achievable, in the same way that you know if I'm, if my average customer comes four times a year, but I can create something to get them to come six times a year every other month. That's a 50 percent increase on that person. I've now delivered a much better outcome to myself. So we use a lot of these tools around our CDP, around various messaging that's tied to offers and using AI appropriately to make them very personalized in the process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can see that. You know, if you looked at that process, what it looked like and what went on to make a personalized offer at scale. 72 years ago it was a very different process. There was a lot of Excel spreadsheeting going on there and you know not to say that.
Speaker 1:And for us, go ahead, go ahead. What I was going to say is awesome. No, you go Please. No, no, no, we're here to hear you.
Speaker 1:Okay. So one of the things also related to when you say how different some of that is is we're not using AI in a lot of smarter ways with respect to making recommendations to guests. But we've had a lot of, like, big surprises respect to making recommendations to guests, but we've had a lot of big surprises. So in the old days, two years ago even, you would say, okay, I'm going to give you something at the end of your meal, and probably it's a dessert, maybe it's a soft drink to upgrade to a shake, maybe it's a side dish, and maybe AI, a little bit of smarts in there, might change which of the categories, maybe a little bit more expensive. Today we've got real data against it and it's shocking some of what you've learned.
Speaker 1:So a major restaurant brand of ours, we launched this program and they're like this is doing bad, you're delivering the wrong things. I ordered a combo and you recommended a sandwich, a hamburger only. Well, guess what? 7% of their audience marries a hamburger to a combo. They had no idea and we're taking the right moments to offer that. It may not be at three o'clock in the afternoon, but it may be at lunchtime, and so that's. Those are the things that are changing today in terms of allowing people to open their minds by having information that can be so micro-targeted to be effective.
Speaker 2:It's wild. It's wild. You know what we never did. We never introduced you. Okay, so this person I haven't talked to the whole time, this fount of wisdom and knowledge, is named Hope Neiman and she is the CEO I'm sorry, cmo, your CEO would appreciate that. Cmo at Tilster and um has a lot to say and really glad we had this conversation and I'm really hoping that we can do a few more of these because, um one, I think you bring a really fresh perspective to the ideas that make loyalty work and because there's a lot of loyalty that just doesn't work out there. That's right, and it ends up being that that fresh perspective is just really good solid human common sense as applied to some really good solid business rules.
Speaker 1:And it's beyond business rules because it's also about emotion. You know, I lived through the first life of e-commerce in places that were not restaurant and the pendulum kept swinging. Traditional marketing was like all about emotion TV ads and you name it. Then it was all about numbers Only look at the metrics, look what it did, and fortunately, not everybody knows. But fortunately, for the most part, the pendulum is swinging back to tie those and as humans, we want a connection. Even though we also enjoy those digital pieces that make life easier, we still don't want to sit in our bubble. I mean, that's really, I think, something that COVID taught all of us. You don't want to just sit at home, you want to be able to connect with people.
Speaker 2:So there is. I'm going to let that one just hang in the air as well, because it's good, it's. It's worth just letting that one just sit there. Well Hope, thank you for your time.
Speaker 1:You're very welcome.
Speaker 2:I mean we had a great time kind of planning this call, had a great time actually doing it with you, Really looking forward to the next few times we can do it.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I had a wonderful time as well. I look forward to our next conversation.
