This is a guest contribution by Johan Jardevall, CEO of Wiraya.com and Steen Madsen, CEO of A GAME ABOVE.com. If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.
Wiraya and A GAME ABOVE join forces to engage, enhance and extend customer lifecycle.
Leading customer activation software provider, Wiraya, has agreed on a long term partnership with customer experience marketing agency, A GAME ABOVE. Writing exclusively for XYZ, the CEOs of both businesses discuss why they have embarked on a journey to make customers believe, across all stages of the lifecycle, and the value benefits they seek to achieve for consumers, client brands and product manufacturers.
The commodity trend?
In recent years, one can witness the flattening of user experience across many forms of purchasing goods and services, whether online or land-based.
User reviews, price comparison and ratings points – all initially meant to help inform decision-making – now appear more transparent for the click-through referral revenues they generate from seller-biased content, leaving many consumers cold, touched more by the sensation that they are always being sold something.
The culture around how we shop and buy can create the impression that everything is of a uniform, equal standard, with price and delivery, particularly online, becoming the chief determinants for where and who we shop with. Over time, this can become increasingly fragmented and despite the dominance of platforms like Amazon, it is important to remember that even there, one is often purchasing from a range of retailers under the umbrella of Amazon’s destination and fulfillment. A decision to try a new brand, engage, transact, and ultimately, return to them, repeatedly, has become a rare customer journey in and of itself.
One only need look to the status of luxury goods, today: previously customers would exhibit “irrational behaviour” towards buying luxury items from brands like Gucci, simply to get their purchase in the “nice Gucci bag”, a status symbol of sorts, that came included with the purchase. The purchase made in a store, at full recommended retail price, it’s worth noting. One could say the shop, the professional staff, the high price point, the “nice Gucci bag” were all parts of a customer experience, for what made one try and buy, today.
Now?
This behaviour is virtually non-existent, since all purchases are expected and realised in anonymous cardboard delivery boxes, and the luxury brand item will have been hunted down to its lowest possible price point, across myriad marketplace platforms.
This does not mean we have trended towards commodity status across all goods and services, however. Nor does it mean customers necessarily demand commodity treatment for how they try and buy goods and services that deliver them a strong sense of who they are, what they want to be, achieve, aspire to and be perceived as. More, it likely indicates that some of the processes behind online shopping, and online-enabled and supported economies across land-based businesses, have left consumers feeling disengaged and disconnected from any notion of a relationship with brands, products and services.
What happens in Vegas…
Wiraya and A GAME ABOVE first encountered one other in the betting and gaming sector, for one core strategy that A GAME ABOVE innovated, which our recently agreed partnership seeks to optimise and perfect across many industries: The Las Vegas Lesson.
Betting and gaming find a natural home in the desert city of Las Vegas, Nevada, but it is surprising, then, to witness how little those products are sold to consumers by any of the brands across the resort.
A clear product challenge exists in betting and gaming, driven by the very real commodity status that impacts that industry: all the games in a casino, and the sports events in a sportsbook, are, in the minds of the mass market audience, the same. Commodities, then.
So, how do Las Vegas casino brands overcome their product challenge?
They achieve this, and demonstrate The Las Vegas Lesson, by never selling gambling. Las Vegas welcomes the audience to an experience forged across:
-The Lifestyle
-The Resort
-The Adult Playground – Sin City – What Happens in Vegas, etc
Betting and gaming are close by to all that Las Vegas offers, but they are not sold to you as a consumer. Las Vegas does not gain and retain by product alone. Las Vegas packages the product with the experience to effect lifestyle moments that engage, enhance lifetime value and extend lifecycle.
Once we opened discussions between A GAME ABOVE and Wiraya, we understood that The Las Vegas Lesson would work across many industries, not only betting and gaming. Our realisation of this, and how we could work together, by combining Wiraya’s customer activation software with A GAME ABOVE’s unique customer sales promotions, and blending it across all we do for clients, has had huge, step-change relevance for both our businesses, clients, teams and, ultimately, for more engaged, entertained and cared-for consumers.
Customer experience. Reloaded.
The positive experiences witnessed from player events A GAME ABOVE has been involved with – in terms of response, retention, reactivation and, most significantly, revenue – across customer-focused events, showed the need for a different kind of audience engagement: healthy, mission and achievement-focused customer behaviour, with loyalty built-in, throughout participation with a customer sales promotion, acting as a literal game above. It wasn’t just about the transaction for these customers. It was also about the status and achievement in completing a mission, qualifying for a championship, or receiving a prize from an against the clock challenge.
Across industries, it’s time to create stories that make customers believe. Our clients have products, services and brands that matter. We help them forge and fulfil stories that celebrate, and campaigns that captivate, realised through A GAME ABOVE’s unique sales promotions and journeys, allied to Wiraya’s data-driven software and communications, making for a powerful sum of the parts, transforming transactions to surprise, delight and embrace customers. Engagement encounters are more valuable when each customer feels they have an individual, emotional connection to a brand, product or service. Our partnership focuses upon delivering gamified communications to one customer, or a like-minded group, focusing delivery, through Wiraya technology, of the right experience, to the right customer, via the right channels and messages, at the right time. We make customers believe, by creating emotional responses throughout their active engagement with our communications for your brand, product or service.
Wiraya and A GAME ABOVE are committed to making each customer’s perception and reality of their involvement with a brand, product and service more engaging, emotional, rewarding and sustainable, for the truly long-term relationship with lifecycle it creates for our clients, and the enhanced value from loyalty that creates for customers.
Welcome to a game above the transaction.
About A GAME ABOVE
A GAME ABOVE create, sell and operate customer sales promotions for your brand, products and community.
These sales promotions – “stories” we call them – deliver:
- Customer engagement
- Customer lifecycle
- Customer lifetime value
Our promotions literally provide a game above the flat transactional engagement most consumers experience today, particularly online.
Engagement with A GAME ABOVE sales promotions moves customers from casual, single purchase into a long-lasting relationship with your brand, products and community, whether online, brick and mortar or a combination of both.
A GAME ABOVE were recently shortlisted for consideration across three eGR B2B Awards categories: Best Acquisition & Retention Partner; Best Marketing & PR Supplier; and, Services Rising Star. The awards take place across July 21-23, 2020.
About Wiraya
Wiraya delivers a managed mobile customer communication software that engages and inspires your customer to act. Wiraya’s software does this with precision in the right channel at the right time at scale in critical moments throughout the customer lifecycle, generating previously unclaimed revenue.
This smart technology, together with Wiraya’s market-leading expertise, helps companies deliver the best experience for their customers and increase their customer lifetime value (CLV).
The challenges we solve:
- Activate your customers
- Engage your unresponsive customers
- Proactively reduce churn and build loyalty
- Inform & update your customers
- Provide a better customer experience
- Boost your CLV
