With a clientele spanning across the U.S. and Canada, nventive specializes in crafting impactful mobile, web applications, and software solutions that increase engagement and enhance the user experience for brands. From strategy to delivery, nventive’s approach seamlessly blends creativity, technology, and strategic thinking.
The core of nventive’s work involves developing custom web and mobile applications, and within the loyalty sector, the company works frequently with coalition programs. Because those programs tend to be more complex, the integrations are vast, requiring nventive to develop many solutions around that vertical.
nventive works in other sectors as well — manufacturing (productivity), financial, retail, and more. Working within these distinct industries allows nventive to glean the best practices across trades and apply them to a specific vector. The company also advises clients and works with existing programs to maximize the experience on mobile platforms.
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with David Hamel, Vice President of Strategy, CX and Design at nventive, about creating a rewarding experience for the customer, the role of micro-interactions in personalization, and leveraging evolving technologies.
With a clientele spanning across the U.S. and Canada, nventive specializes in crafting impactful mobile, web applications, and software solutions that increase engagement and enhance the user experience for brands. From strategy to delivery, nventive’s approach seamlessly blends creativity, technology, and strategic thinking.
The core of nventive’s work involves developing custom web and mobile applications, and within the loyalty sector, the company works frequently with coalition programs. Because those programs tend to be more complex, the integrations are vast, requiring nventive to develop many solutions around that vertical.
nventive works in other sectors as well — manufacturing (productivity), financial, retail, and more. Working within these distinct industries allows nventive to glean the best practices across trades and apply them to a specific vector. The company also advises clients and works with existing programs to maximize the experience on mobile platforms.
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with David Hamel, Vice President of Strategy, CX and Design at nventive, about creating a rewarding experience for the customer, the role of micro-interactions in personalization, and leveraging evolving technologies.
Speaker 1:
Good afternoon, good morning. This is Mark Johnson from Loyalty360. I hope everyone's happy, safe and well. I want to welcome you to another edition of Loyalty Live. In this series, we have the privilege of speaking with leading agencies, technology partners and consultants, and customer channel and brand loyalty about the technology trends and best practices that impact a brand's ability to drive unique experiences, enhance engagement but, most importantly, impact customer loyalty. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with David Hamel. He's the Vice President of Strategy and Customer Experience and Design at Inventive David, how are you today?
Speaker 2:
I'm good and you Doing well, thank you.
Speaker 1:
We'd like to start these on a more personal level, so we'd love to know a little bit more about yourself, your current role with Inventive and maybe a little bit about your background.
Speaker 2:
That'd be great to know. Yes, so currently at Inventive I lead, as you said, the strategy, customer experience and design team. We're focusing on solving complex challenges, especially in the loyalty industry, as well as other verticals. I've been in digital for about 20 years. I do have a mechanical engineering background, so a bit of a different twist there and I originally started working with the Sol System, which was a 3D modeling product lifecycle management company 3D modeling product lifecycle management company. They had a sister company in aviation, and so that was interesting work. And then I moved and worked at Electronic Arts in mobile gaming. So I do have a gaming background. And, yeah, my experience spans from design to implementation of digital experiences, be it mobile apps or web apps or back-end systems. Recent projects for instance, we crafted a mobile experience for a large coalition program in Canada and we also worked in white label solutions for a more brand specific offering. Okay, interesting.
Speaker 1:
For those who may not be familiar with Inventive, you talked a little bit about some of the things that your brand or your organization does. Can you talk a little bit more about how you support a brand's customer loyalty efforts? Give us a brief overview, uh, on that and also maybe the interviews that you focus on or that you work within yes, um.
Speaker 2:
so at the core, inventive develops web, custom web and mobile applications. And for the loyalty sector, we worked a lot with coalition programs because they are more complex, the integrations are more vast, and so we developed quite a bit of solutions around that vertical.
Speaker 2:
We're also involved in other sectors, in manufacturing, for instance, in productivity. We were also involved in auction type of industry, a bit like eBay, if you will, but it's not eBay, it's someone else. We're involved in the financial sector, so we can kind of get a gist of the best practices across industry and apply them to a specific vector. Loyalty is an important one for us. It has been for the last few years. We did several mobile projects in the sector web projects also and we're really there to advise our clients and work with existing programs to maximize the experience on the mobile platform. There's really a lot we can do in that regard.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Interesting One of the things that we love to know is how individuals define customer loyalty, both from a brand and a kind of agency perspective. So we'd love to know how you define customer loyalty, what it means to your organization and also what it means to the clients you help support.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's. It's really not an easy question because it's different per customer. We see that in the market and so that's a great question, because we actually do see difference in the market. It's dependent on the business context of our clients, their business model, their value proposition. They're all different In the literal sense.
Speaker 2:
For us, customer loyalty is about an active customer that you want to continue doing business with and that wants to continue doing business with the brand. To us, it's more than just points and rewards. It's about engagement from the customer on several touch points. Mobile is just one of them. It can be in-store, it can be on the web, it can be on other channels, but it's mainly for us improving their consideration for the brand and rewarding them for the actions they take. Rewarding not just in points or cash back or currency. It's rewarding through the experience itself.
Speaker 2:
Basically, if you play games on mobile, you're constantly engaged and rewarded for every action you pose. So you get essentially a polished user interface. You get real-time data updates, you get push notification, you get haptic feedback, the small vibrations that the phone gives you when you do an action, you get personalized offer, and all of these things are rewarding for a customer and it has nothing to do with monetary value. It's just they see they do an action, they see it was a good action, and so they engage more and more with the experience and they engage more and more with your brand. So we try, we are bringing this thinking in the projects we develop for clients, and it's also to go past the program itself. Loyalty for us comes from good customer service or ease of payment, the types of actions that bring engagement from the customer, that brings ease of use. So for us that's all something that brings loyalty from a customer.
Speaker 1:
When you look at the technology landscape, it's evolving quite rapidly. In the technologies that may have been focused on tag management, now we're doing identity management. There's a confluence of different technologies and functionalities, which creates some challenges and potentially opportunities for brands. So when you look at that from a brand perspective and you already talked about how you help brands, you know leverage technology in kind of the shopping networks and others you know how can brands leverage some of these new technologies or enhance capabilities within customer loyalty platforms, ai, machine learning and communication to help them drive deeper customer loyalty.
Speaker 2:
Yes, that that also will be different for brands and it's different because of their technology ecosystem that they have. So we see a lot of legacy tech stack or existing tech stack. Some people have their in-house loyalty platform. Others are using vendors, so it will depend client per client. With the current advancement of AI AI offering, especially since late 2022 when ChatGPT amazed the world, there's been a lot of progress in the offering and it's now more simple and straightforward to use in existing products. So if you're using a commercial off-the-shelf solution, you will likely have access from that vendor to some of these AI capabilities. If it's not on their roadmap, I'd be starting to think to maybe investigate other options.
Speaker 2:
If you're working within the house team, what we see and where we get involved sometimes a lot of times actually is to help concentrate on proof of concepts and see what works and what doesn't. Every month there's a new offering on something AI. You said it was about tagging, adding info, doing video description, building description for products, making sure the database or the segments are well made, tackling the volume of data that you get. There's always a new tool available every month, so we test them out in a small scale like kind of lab setting and then we pass it to the production teams who can implement it in the solutions. So people can do that in-house with their own teams or for us. It's how we usually get involved.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Can you provide a few examples how brands are successfully potentially integrating these new technologies or enhanced capabilities? Into their customer loyalty strategies.
Speaker 2:
Yes, so right now. So in the past, brands tend to focus on transaction data to personalize experiences. More and more they're capturing intent. So someone browses through product or someone looks at it for several seconds or minutes or looks a couple of lookalikes. It's all grading their interest towards an item or an experience or whatnot. And then this is fed to the database and basically the experience gets personalized according to these micro interactions with products. You can see that a lot from Amazon, timu, pinterest, ouse. It's more mobile than loyalty, but it's a lot of personalization. And then, especially, I tried Timu in the last few months and they're re-engaging customers on all channels In the app with push notification through SMS, through email. It's a bit overwhelming. I mean, you tend to like close them out or unsubscribe from their constant messages, but they do it a lot. So if you just tone it down a little bit, I guess it's a good use case there.
Speaker 1:
Okay, when you look at some of the clients you have, you have what's working for them when it comes to building successful loyalty programs and strategies. Can you provide a couple of examples within your client base of what you see seems to be working quite well?
Speaker 2:
So some programs tend to be very complex. Sometimes it's okay, sometimes it's a good strategy, but where we see where we can help, at least, is making sure the customer understands the value of the program through the experience itself. And I think when people concentrate on doing that, they engage with a larger customer base. Essentially they can maximize their program. They see more value from it, so they'll re-engage with it and the engagement loop is then active, so they'll keep coming back. They'll concentrate their purchases to that vendor and it's really where we can see that we can help them and that they need to develop this. So sometimes they have multipliers, status level tiers and so on.
Speaker 2:
It's very, very complex and through items that we see, it's called micro interaction. When you first start an app, they tell you, do this, do that, or within the experience itself, you can help the client understand how to maximize his return, and this is really something the mobile channel but also you can do it on other channels can help, and it's one thing that's very important. I think it's a bit underused currently in the market, to be honest.
Speaker 1:
One of the trends that we saw in our State of Customer Loyalty paper, a research paper they do every year with our brand community is that a number of brands are focused on redoing their customer loyalty program or adding functionality to the program. What are you seeing around? Program relaunches or updates? What are clients asking for of you?
Speaker 2:
you know, what do you? What are clients asking for of you? Um, we do see um a higher desire to personalize the experience, um, and there's there's various level um of of that that are possible. Um, so, but we do see an intent to personalize the experience more and more. Uh, it's been present for some time, but now people are really getting into it.
Speaker 2:
There is also a desire to use true gamified experiences. So in the past, people were thinking of gamification, as I'll create a small game within my experience, it's really not about that. It's using game mechanics to foster the engagement loop. So it's using the same principles used in a game, but to help a customer we were just talking about that but understand what he's about to do, and the benefit of it is it's having real-time information. It's having progress bars.
Speaker 2:
You know pretty much how you're doing within the loyalty game, if you will, at every instant, and over that is, people are looking to provide support users with what they should do next. So that's what you also live through in a game. We also see more and more of the subscription model alongside the regular programs. So that's another trend that's coming essentially from the prime program of Amazon, but now we can see that a lot of brands are trying to put this forward, and the last one is really trying to reduce the friction as much as possible and offer a seamless experience across all channels to customers, and it's a focus that we can see. People are trying very hard to reduce that friction. So if you interact with the client center, then the person in store has that information and so on. So it requires a lot of back-end work to make that happen.
Speaker 1:
Are there programs that you admire, that you are loyal to? From a customer loyalty perspective, what do you like about their offerings?
Speaker 2:
Have you ever heard of the Triangle program from Canadian Tire?
Speaker 1:
We are familiar with the program. We've interviewed some people on the team, but it's been a while. But we'd love to know why you're loyal to the Canadian Tire.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So it's a very Canadian brand obviously Might be a bit less familiar outside of Canada. It's actually a coalition program. They have, I think, five or six sub-brands and they have a branded MasterCard. That play a big role in their offering and when you download their app you can subscribe to their program without being a MasterCard holder. But when you do, the app changes and becomes kind of a financial and loyalty app at the same time. So that's very interesting because there's kind of an engagement loop right there with the financial aspect of it payments, monthly payments and so on.
Speaker 2:
But Canadian Tire used to have Canadian Tire money, real paper money, and people are very nostalgic about that. But now it stays. It's still Canadian entire money, but it's all digital. But they build it in a way. We were talking about personalization in the past and they kind of flip the table and they personalize based on community exchanges so you can get perks and multipliers.
Speaker 2:
Basically, they give you every Thursday, they give you a set of I don't know about 50 offers and you can go and trade them on an open market and that's very interesting because you can maximize the return for certain product categories and it creates kind of an engagement week to week to see what you get, and it's working very well. There's a lot of value in that program when you understand how it works and they allow you to stack all their offerings. So sometimes they have promotion on Thursday that you can stack with a special bonus and then you get something even more with the credit card. So there's kind of three rewards into one. And when you understand that and they push for it they do some indication around it it's totally okay to gain the experience and so it's a very good program.
Speaker 1:
Okay, excellent. Canada is a little bit of a distinct mark from the US with the large coalition programs. Everyone's kind of staked out their own territory, but it sounds from the nostalgia aspect that that's very unique using paper money and something that has that emotive appeal. So that's great to hear. When you look at what's next for Inventive as you move forward in 2024, any ideas, closing thoughts, what you may see or what we may see or expect to see from Inventive.
Speaker 2:
Yes, we do more and more AI integration. So, as I was saying, the offering is developing quickly and so we look. We always integrate new third parties into client solutions, so there's a lot of that on the roadmap. We're working with partners in the loyalty industry and we're trying to grow the amount of partners that we have. So we're looking forward to partner with more brands and service providers in 2024. And we launched a lab in 2023 that's called Blooper. It's a loyalty lab actually to showcase what I was saying before the gamified or polished experience through a mobile lab, the micro interactions and so on. So we're looking forward to continue in that lab in 2024.
Speaker 1:
Excellent. Now is the fun quickfire question series. We like one word or short phrase responses. What is your favorite word Different? What is your least favorite word? No, what excites you Learning? Excellent.
Speaker 2:
What do you find tiresome?
Speaker 1:
Red tape. What is one technology marketers?
Speaker 2:
should prioritize implementing. We touched on it, but it's very good mobile apps for now and AI in the future. Okay Is there a book that you like that you recommend to colleagues. It's an older book, but I think it's from 2004, 2005. It's the Paradox of Choice by Barry.
Speaker 1:
Schwartz yeah.
Speaker 2:
There's actually a TED Talk on it. That's excellent.
Speaker 1:
The book is good too. Yes, more is not always better. Yeah, excellent. So when you know what profession or is your profession, or what profession should I say would you like to attempt other than the one you're currently in?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I'll go back to my roots and say race car engineer.
Speaker 1:
Okay, who inspired you to become the person you are today?
Speaker 2:
Many people. I can't really name one. It would be family, teachers, friends, colleagues, public figures even.
Speaker 1:
Okay, Well, who do you? What do you typically think about at the end of the day?
Speaker 2:
I need to know more about something. I need to know more about that. I'm always looking to know more about something.
Speaker 1:
Okay, how do you want to be remembered by your friends and family? Quietly, caring, excellent, okay, great. Well, david, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. It was great getting to know you a little better and also learning more about some of the things that Inventive is working on and how you're bringing the industry together in a very unique way. So thank you very much for taking the time and look forward to hearing more from Evan throughout the rest of the year. Thanks a lot. All right, thank you everyone for taking the time to join us today and make sure you join us back for another edition of Bulletin Live soon, and until then, have a wonderful day.
