When I’m working with any of my business partners in the Customer Strategy Network, whether from the UK or New Zealand, I’m used to being treated as a second class citizen.

There is something about the British-influenced accent and manner of speech that simply makes everything they say sound more intelligent than my best shot. At the least, we like to jab each other about this in fun, but the truth is, my foreign counterparts have a knack for getting their message across.

Yesterday as I opened white mail from Office Depot’s Worklife Rewards® and email from Best Buy’s Reward Zone®, I was struggling to put my finger on how the two programs contrasted in their management of member communications. My English friend cleared it up for me in one pithy phrase by saying “people don’t like fiddly things”.

When it comes to maintaining customer engagement with rewards and loyalty programs these days, nothing more telling could be said.

That day, I received a threefold brochure from Worklife Rewards informing me that I had earned a reward for $11 and included a plastic card that I could take to the store and use to redeem against purchase. The brochure provided a mini-statement of my account as well as some partner offers from 1-800 Flowers, Ameriprise Financial, Budget & National Car Rental, and LaQuinta.

The communications piece was easy to read, got to the point, and the delivery of the reward got my attention.

On the same day, I received an email from Reward Zone informing me that my account needed activation. This was strange to me as I have had an account with Best Buy since the program opened over 5 years ago. The next day I received an email from Best Buy offering me their cobrand credit card, but referencing a different reward account number. Strange as well.

I’ll save you the details by saying that a duplicate account had been created through one of my purchases and only after multiple attempts to login to both accounts and a phone call to the customer service center was I able to resolve the matter.

The good news is the matter was resolved. The bad news is that I don’t think many people would have taken the time and exercised my patience to endure the process. I’m a Loyalty Geek and had I not been looking into this for business reasons, would have disconnected with Reward Zone and given the program no further attention or energy.

Loyalty program sponsors and operators need to constantly seek out the “fiddly things” in the member experience and seek to streamline and simplify that experience with the objective of keeping consumers in love with their brand and their rewards program. Best Buy had a few too many Loyalty Asterisks in the process for my taste and I’m sure these Fiddly Things would have driven the average customer mad, causing them, in English parlance, to “bugger off”.

Don’t let that happen to your brand.

Having a well planned and executed Customer Strategy should be the litmus test for the efficacy of today’s corporate marketing department. Think you can live without it? Then ask yourself why companies are putting more choice in consumer hands each day and striving to gain perspective on customer preferences via blogs and communities.

Whether a Loyalty program should be part of the Customer Strategy is continually up for debate. My old friends at Colloquy have long postulated that “Loyalty is a tie breaker”, citing distinct circumstances that loyalty can and cannot influence. The assumption is that industries which are highly competitive and are approaching commoditization can leverage a loyalty program to their advantage. Caution is encouraged as shortfalls in brand image, product or service quality, pricing, or even physical coverage of a geographic area will limit the impact of even the most compelling loyalty program.

I have been studying loyalty programs across vertical industries and have a pending research paper which will outline a new set of best practices for the business. Look out for the related white paper, coming soon. In the meantime, I had to share my experience with two big box retailers illustrating how pricing anomalies can constitute one of those hurdles that even a well done rewards program cannot clear.

A simple home project caused me to seek out a 25 foot section of CAT5e networking cable. Since I needed to buy some office supplies and like Worklife Rewards, I headed into Office Depot to knock off my to-do list. There I found two choices of cable, with Gray or Blue being my color choices. The $31.99 price point seemed high, but I trusted ODI to be true to their big box origins and tossed the cable into my cart.

The need for some way to neatly attach the cable to the wall led me to Home Depot as nothing of the sort was available at ODI. Within 30 minutes I was staring at the clips I needed and, OMG, the exact cable just purchased at a price of $14.98. Not only could I save big bucks, but the cable came in white, a much better choice for my application.

Giving Office Depot the benefit of the doubt, I hope that I stumbled onto a true exception. I can understand price variances on individual items within a reasonable range, but this was a shocker. I left with the suspicion that ODI must provide certain items as “convenience purchases” to their shoppers and exacts a premium price in return.

Whatever the explanation for this huge price differential, this was an un-welcome wakeup call to a loyal customer. I felt betrayed. Where Worklife Rewards had lulled me into a willingness to give the chain a broad share of my home and office spend, I now was wondering how much those points were really costing me.

All things being equal, Loyalty programs are supposed to break the tie. They are intended to redirect consumer attention from price to free program benefits. My experience snapped me out of my loyalty trance and rerouted my brain to more carefully evaluate pricing of any significant item. More importantly, my confidence in taking a relaxed approach to shopping in this store was shaken.

Transparency and trust are two essential elements of building long term loyalty. I hope that these items are not “discontinued merchandise” at Office Depot but only “temporarily out of stock” >>>> Bill Hanifin