China Paradigm interviewed Eliza Mao, Customer Succes Director of Splio, to discuss loyalty program and customer relationship management in China. The idea is to dive into the complicated Chinese ecosystem and to understand how a tech solution like SPLIO can help brands optimize their engagement and retention programs.
Eliza Mao, a young working woman, specialized in loyalty campaigns in China
Eliza is the Customer Success Director at SPLIO, where she helps brands build and maintain effective customer relationship management in China. She worked for 4 years in System in Motion before joining Splio’s team in 2016.
She is graduated from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University with a master’s degree in engineering management. She has developed strong expertise in the fields of e-commerce and social e-commerce, loyalty, and software project management.
Splio, the leading SaaS loyalty marketing platform
SPLIO is a Saas platform, a customer platform helping brands to run targeted loyalty campaigns in China. The company currently has 5 offices in the world, headquarters in Shanghai, and about 500 clients for a team of around 130 people.
Their clients are B2C clients, a lot of them in fashion, cosmetics, skin care… Splio help them either build their customer relationship management in China from scratch or adapt it using the right channel to address the Chinese audience in the way they prefer. One of the biggest strength of SPLIO is that they are a worldwide company in China and have a global perspective but close to the Chinese market. They are, therefore, able to quickly adapt international CRM strategies locally.
“We provide end to end expertise for helping brands to build their strategy for their CRM strategy, their data integration part, and also the daily operation.”
Splio recently acquired Gowento to enable their customers to modernize customer relations by communicating personalized experiences via mobile phones, a preferred tool in China more than anywhere else.
Splio, therefore, allows brands to develop campaigns to retain their best customers by rewarding them with appropriate offers but first of all, to know them and build loyalty to increase the repurchase rate.
How to adapt your customer relationship management in China
According to Eliza Mao, the biggest challenge is around the omnichannel journey.
“You have to invest efforts in every touch point and make sure that the level of service is the same throughout the Omnichannel journey.”
For every business in China, data is key. And Eliza Mao underlined the fact that when you do loyalty, compared to out of China, Chinese people are relatively less sensitive on personal data. All registration processes are easier, so it is not that hard to get quality data.
When compared to other markets, Chinese consumers develop many more touch points because they use more different tools daily. For example, in China, the primary engagement channel is Wechat, whether online or offline. Brands must, therefore, take into account all their customers’ interactions on Wechat and not only the occasional purchases of their brands’ products.
“They need to bind every purchase and action behaviors into one single customer view and make sure that their loyalty and user journey is at the same level wherever the customer goes. This is the first thing.”
Thanks to their platform, brands can leverage the function of target modules to segment into different groups of consumers and follow their customer’s purchase information for other channels.
Eliza then gives the example of Nike, which has perfectly understood the challenge of adapting the customer relationship management in China by developing an international retention strategy but leaving local teams free to make the necessary adaptations to the different markets.
The trends to build customer loyalty in China in 2019
First retargeting is becoming key, even if a bit late compared to the West. New Chinese agencies and platforms are being developed on the model of Facebook Pixel or Linkedin’s solution to improve targeting.
Secondly, Chinese consumers love samples, especially in the cosmetics industry, so it is also a great way to increase customer loyalty in China.
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