#MobExAwards highlight: StarHub takes a gamified route to drive loyalty

With every telco in Singapore trying to reward their customers via a points-based loyalty program, StarHub knew taking the same route was never going to be enough.  With Asia leading the west in the instant-gratification economy, marginal differentiation created by novel subscription plans, and promotions governed by clever T&Cs hardly moved the needle for customer engagement or churn in the telecom industry.  

Moreover as MVNOs offered extra gigabytes to a mobile plan, StarHub knew that it needed to think out of the box. With a decent number of merchant partnerships powering the rewards of the loyalty programme, StarHub knew it could afford to push the boundaries of its strategy.

Challenges

While StarHub’s loyalty programme drove a cumulative increase in points earned by customers, it contributed less to driving net-new transactions or customer actions. Moreover, with the attractive rewards points program adoption customers had to wait to accumulate points through regular bill payment and the addition of add-on service activations before they could redeem the rewards they love. 

To offer more variety of rewards treats, an extensive merchant lifestyle collaboration was needed, which would help StarHub to learn more of customers’ interest.  

With the increase in customer expectations and the programme cost skewed towards cashback and rebates, the team felt that it was time to rethink a better way to drive the programme from a cost and customer engagement perspective. Moreover, the points based programme needed to move beyond just the website

Strategy  

StarHub’s customers live in an instant gratification world and expect to be rewarded in the same fashion for their actions. Building on the voices of what customers want, and in keeping with its brand promise to innovate, StarHub infused the following attributes into the all-new StarHub Rewards’ User Experience: instant, mobile-first, all-digital and super simple. This key transformation helped the brand move towards building a stronger, more rewarding relationship with our customers.   

Something new every week: With this approach there is always something new every week for StarHub customers to interact with and be rewarded for.

With the ability to continuously approach our customers with new rewards delivered through gamified customer journey our customers can: 

• Enjoy the treats with just a few taps, 
• Redeem rewards easily, all under one place on MyStarHub app, 
• Frequently and more meaningfully interact with their telco. 

Execution 

Membership tier programme: Prior to deploying loyalty tiers (Green, Gold, Platinum), a lot of emphases were placed on customer data points to arrive at individualised targetable customer personas. This new tier programme gave StarHub the opportunity to optimise resources to serve customers across all touchpoints and higher spending members to received priority service experiences such as faster queues on hotlines, or personalised lifestyle privileges based on preferences.  

Personalised rewards: Traditional digital marketing techniques tend to saturate customer experience with an overload of promotions. In this instant gratification and lifestyle-led economy, such approaches have only proven to be counter-intuitive, shifting from building brand-recall to building brand-annoyance. Driven by data, personalisation is one of StarHub’s key arsenals, be it rewards or perks or privileges.

Instead of partnering with thousands of merchants, it handpicked 100 popular merchants that better suited the individualized customer personas. 

Snapping Saturday: Similar to other large B2Cs, telcos typically don’t typically launch regular or periodic promotions and rewards. However, to thank customers, StarHub went against this norm by launching ‘Snapping Saturday’ campaigns, on the Saturday of every week  which saw treats handed out at only SG$1 for every StarHub customer, and the customers with the finger-snapping reaction time on-screen (in-app gamification) win the treats.  

Gameplay-base rewards: Gamification triggers powerful human emotions – Happiness, excitement, and more.  Everyone loves rewards and most people will go out to get their hands-on rewards. When they complete each time, they can enjoy a reward. This will drive repeat behaviour in them, giving them a sense of achievement.  

Strategic Technology Partnership: StarHub partnered with Perx Technologies, leading customer engagement and loyalty SaaS platform that was able to deliver the last-mile customer engagements and new-age concepts such as gamification. 

Building trust through continuous, meaningful brand-customer interaction: Perx Platform helped reduce the usually painful process of campaign set up which takes up to 12 weeks, to just 30 minutes. We leveraged this key advantage to the fullest with the launch of weekly recurring campaigns powered by gamification mechanics and tactics. This ushered in the possibility of continuous customer engagement in the age of sporadic and reactive campaigns executed by competition – in other words, improved customer-brand affinity and stickiness. 

The brand used its 360 in-house comms channels touchpoints to their fullest for the GTM push. This included SMS, electronic direct mailer, In-App Push Notifications, Digital Publications, In-house bill message, In-store ePoster, StarHub TV, In-App promotions, Instagram, Facebook and StarHub Rewards website.  

Results

StarHub’s data below on customer engagement reflected that customer adoption to the new instant gratification powered program has been exponential and steadily growing. 

The existing customer acquisition target StarHub had set to achieve 30 days from launch was to onboard 10% of existing StarHub Singapore households onto the New Rewards Loyalty Program. At the end of 30 days, the outcome exceeded our target by over 100% onboarding 20% of StarHub households.  As of June 2020, this number has risen from 20% to 50% of all StarHub Households in Singapore.

As of June 2020, over 1.1 Million rewards have been issued to Customers since launch. This translates to over 90,000 rewards redeemed monthly by Customers, thanks to the novel combination of next-gen in-app customer experience, dynamic incentive-led campaigns and infusing the concept of gamification to every last-mile customer engagement on the MyStarHub App.  

The number mentioned above (shown in below figure) is significant because rewards are issued upon a customer completing a specific action. In other words, the all-new StarHub Rewards loyalty program drove 1.1 Million+ new customer actions powered by Perx’s gamified reward-based in-app engagement.   

As a proof point to improving our NPS, StarHub emerges stronger in the 2020 edition of the National Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG*) study. In fact, customers’ satisfaction scores for StarHub’s Mobile and TV services rose in 2020 and are at the highest levels to-date.