The Chief Loyalty Officer Perspective: Managing Technology, Fraud and Employee Incentives

By Frances Moffett, Editorial Content Director, HSMAI

HSMAI hosted leaders in loyalty from Accor, BWH Hotels & Resorts, Outrigger, Red Roof, The Venetian Resort, and Wyndham Hotels during its recent Chief Loyalty Officer Virtual Executive Roundtable. The group addressed several topics, including the impact of travel disruptions on status, managing fraud, employee incentives for enrolling guests in programs, and the challenges they’re facing regarding finding talent. Here’s how they responded to questions about these pressing issues.

Q&A: How have you addressed travel disruptions and the impact on status?

  • Extended status into 2022
  • Reduced the night requirement
  • Extended points expiration
  • Removed formal tiers

Q&A: What are best practices in managing customer data platform implementation?

  • “Make sure to have a clear data strategy and ownership within the organization.”
  • “Follow good project management [best practices] and have constant communication with all stakeholders.”
  • “We deployed a CDP [in] 2020. It’s a very powerful tool and a tremendous application that requires a certain level of skill within the organization to manage. We have a vendor we work with, and it’s allowed us to automate a ton of our communications to our guests throughout the entire journey. We can automate a variety of those communications, and we leverage it to trigger messages to guests while they’re at our resort, based on certain activities.”

Q&A: How are you managing engagement with the new iOS privacy standards?

  • “[Our strategy] hasn’t really changed, except for rethinking trigger attributes. We’re tracking the opens blocked — the people who have chosen to opt out of being identified. We get that number from our ESP, and they pull them out of our open rates. Of course, our open rates are going down, but our click rates have not changed; in fact, they’ve got a little stronger. We had a big hit around October when early adopters were changing those settings, but now it’s kind of leveled out.”

Q&A: What types of fraud are you seeing? How are you managing it?

  • “We’re seeing account takeovers and property front-desk fraud. To manage it, we have separate internal teams focused on it and work with a third party to access AI tools.”
  • “Sometimes we’ll see an individual, maybe a friend of the account holder or someone who knows them, who will go in and take over the account and try to make redemptions. We look at every redemption and compare things such as an email change on the last day, and then we just block the redemption. And they don’t call us, so we know they weren’t supposed to be doing it.”
  • “This doesn’t happen very often, but when big points are involved, sometimes we’ll see friends or family sharing an account, and then the person who owns the account will claim that someone hacked into it and stole all their points. Except it was someone they knew, and the whole thing was planned.”

Q&A: What are best practices in training/incentives for employees to consistently enroll guests?

Q&A: How would you rate these challenges facing commercial talent in hospitality?

Q&A: In the new talent and landscape of your corporate team, which of these themes are priorities for you personally in 2022?


Categories: Marketing
Insight Type: Articles