Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Leaders in Customer Loyalty Industry Voices: Switchfly’s Nowell Outlaw on Travel as the Ultimate Loyalty Catalyst
Brands are continually seeking innovative ways to enhance member engagement and provide additional value through their customer loyalty strategies. Integrating travel experiences into rewards portfolios has emerged as a compelling strategy to achieve these goals.
In this edition of Leaders in Customer Loyalty: Industry Voices, Loyalty360’s Ethan Perry speaks with Nowell Outlaw, CEO of Switchfly, a travel experience platform that assists companies in creating memorable moments for their customers and employees. Outlaw discusses Switchfly's role in enhancing loyalty and rewards programs, its expansion into employee recognition solutions, and the impact of personalization and AI on the future of customer loyalty.
Good afternoon and good morning. This is Ethan Perry, director of Content at Loyalty360, welcoming you to another edition of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty Industry Voices series. In these episodes, we talk to the leading agencies, technology partners and consultants in the customer channel and brand loyalty world about the technology, the trends and the best practices that impact the ability of brands to drive unique experiences, enhance engagement and, most importantly, enhance customer loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Noel Outlaw and the CEO at Switchfly. Welcome, noel, hi morning. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Can you start by telling our audience a little bit about yourself, your role with SwitchFly and your background Sure.
Speaker 2:So I'm a serial entrepreneur, right. I've done all kinds of things. I've owned my own software company. I actually owned a small air charter business in Broomfield for a period of time.
Speaker 2:I ran prior to Switchfly, I ran a artificial intelligence and machine learning company you know, venture, backed and all those things in the Bay Area and started with Switchfly about three and a half years ago, which is a travel, basically loyalty platform for driving experiences to consumers. I'm the CEO. I've kind of been a CEO almost my entire career. That's just one of those things that you kind of learn to do.
Speaker 1:Excellent, awesome. Well, can you tell our audience, who may not be familiar, a little bit more about Switchfly and how you support brands, loyalty efforts, what you guys do and what industries you work with?
Speaker 2:Sure, I mean, I tell people jokingly that SwitchFly is the silent, silent partner that you've never heard of, right, so we drive primarily. Switchfly is a 20-year-old company and we have been in the loyalty space for 20 years actually 21 years and primarily servicing travel Right and travel loyalty programs are a big deal, right, I mean anyone who's flown, you know the people basically on the plane or the flight attendants handing out you know, join the XYZ airline credit card thing, earn points, do this, do that. Loyalty is a big deal in travel. And Switchfly specializes in powering vacation programs.
Speaker 2:So we are a completely white-labeled engine that is sitting kind of behind the scenes but also in front of the scenes. So we are the user experience the scenes, but also in front of the scenes. So we are the user experience. We are the booking engine for everything from flights to hotels, to car rentals, to activities. We power some kind of key brands like American Airlines, jetblue Airlines, vacation products and also American Express on a global scale, internationally. So we're a global company. We have just under 200 employees but we operate effectively seven by 24, by 365, on a spinning the earth in a circle basis, because we're all over the place.
Speaker 1:Very cool. So, as a global brand, they're working with people across. You know travel. How do you define customer loyalty and what does that mean to your organization?
Speaker 2:um. So what's interesting is that we actually transitioned the company about two and a half years ago, so that we're we're actually beyond just a travel company, so we're actually, as a tech company, we're actually also a travel agency. So now we're actually the seller and record of travel as well, and loyalty in travel is very specific about what are you providing to that consumer for that experience and and what we're seeing is that you know we are powering both individual travel sales right for people where they can reward themselves with travel, as well, as you know our customers where it's using your points. So if I have points on american airlines, I can actually cash those points in as well as add additional funds in order to buy my vacation to Hawaii. Make sense, yeah very cool.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting place to be right now with all of the shifts happening. You know we saw in our most recent state of customer loyalty report that 79% of brands in general have an interest in updating, enhancing or redoing their loyalty offerings. Do you see specific places in your industry where someone's leading the charge in loyalty innovation, and what are they?
Speaker 2:doing differently right now, yeah, I mean. So what we found? We at Switchfly so very specifically travel, so just narrow in on what we do, so very specifically travel, no-transcript it's. You know, those players have made their vendor decisions. It's not an open field, right?
Speaker 2:And so the interesting market that we opened up and unlocked was in what's called the HR tech, or the rewards and recognition space, which I consider. Brand loyalty is coming through your employer, so your employer is giving you points, just like you get points for a credit card to redeem for merchandise, gift cards, those kinds of things. And what we found was that none of the vendors in that space had travel as a segment, right? We did a bunch of market research into that space and it was like, hey, all these vendors really want travel, right, and even the consumers, right. The ultimate consumers are like why do I keep having to buy gift cards? Right, because that's a bad process. Why can't I have travel as an experience and use my points to buy travel? So that's what we did. The interesting thing is we started that about two years ago and we've gone from zero and we now have about 25 million consumers around the world who can exchange their points for switch flight for travel using the switch flight platform yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1:We recently just published an industry perspectives article about the importance of engaging with your employees to make your customer facing loyalty program more successful, and how you engage with those internal customers reflects how you engage with your external customers. You know? So that's very cool. So you know, among, like the new technologies, everyone's talking about ai. There's a lot of discussion about gamification, zero party and first party data collection.
Speaker 2:What do you think is going to have the biggest impact on customer loyalty programs in 2025, and why? I think it's AI and understand I spent five years running an AI company, right, so I have a kind of a background in this. You know, we trained over a billion data points to build our data models, right, and the. I think the thing that loyalty programs will start to learn is they will start to learn the um, the persona really, the persona of who their consumer really is. Right, and you know there's there's the data collection piece and all this other stuff, but what I'm talking about is, um, you know, if you think about Netflix, right, like Netflix isn't a loyalty program, but, boy, consumers sure are loyal to Netflix Right.
Speaker 2:And if you think about the engagement with a platform like that, it's really, it's smart enough to know, in a lot of ways, what you want next, right, and I think that, as loyalty engages in some of these models and things get smarter, what you're going to see is hey, you know before you're thinking about it.
Speaker 2:In our case, here's a vacation package to Hawaii, and you were just thinking about the vacation package to going to Hawaii, right? Or here's, you know, if you like vacation packages to beach resorts here's three beach resort kind of things, right, and, and there's there's some of this engagement is happening. But I think that the, the loyalty programs, are going to start to get smarter about this Right when, where it's tailored to fit the consumer ahead of when they're thinking about it, and that's just. You know, we see that all over the place. I mean, oftentimes people joke about, you know, google serves me an ad and I was just thinking about that and people are checking their cell phones going, is the microphone on? And it's like no, no, the microphone's not on. It's just smart enough to predict right, predictive behaviors and I think loyalty will, over time, start having some of that stuff that's starting to get there.
Speaker 1:Very cool. No-transcript, no matter where they connect with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a hard one, right? So one of our customers is a hotel right, and they are working on this. It is extremely hard. And if you think about a hotel being in-store right, and they are working on this, it is extremely hard. And if you think about a hotel being in store right, what they're looking for is you know when you go to their resort right, so you've purchased a room, you've purchased a trip, but now when you're walking around the resort, the reader boards are offering you things that are specific to you, right? So as you walk by, things, the things that you're seeing might be relevant for your agenda at the resort Right, and things like that. And you think about, you know, think about Disney, like, as they can tailor stuff specifically for you, right? I think that that the you're going to start to see that integration.
Speaker 2:So it's recommendations regardless. It doesn't matter if you're in the store or out of the store. If you think about, you know if anyone's been on an airplane lately, right? The very cool thing about the iPhone is you know if you're using the United app or Air Canada app or American Airlines app. When you land at the airport, it tells you where to go, right, so you're now transitioning from a digital experience to an in-store experience, right, where?
Speaker 2:Now I'm in the airport. Now I'm walking around. Now, all of a sudden, right, I know, you're at the airport, you're a points consumer. Right, you have a three-hour layover. What are the recommendations that I could make to you? Right, here's a $5 off coupon to go to your points at snooze in the Denver airport, concourse B, upstairs. I go there all the time, but those kinds of things, right, if you think about the digital in-store going from device right Device to the in-store experience, that's what's going to start happening. Right, you're on the plane, you're bored. Hey, here's an idea, right, recommendation, and now it's going to drive your behavior kind of in the airport for what you do before you're bored. Hey, here's an idea, right, recommendation, and now it's going to drive your behavior kind of in the airport for what you do before you go to your next flight. I, I see that coming immediately. Amazing, I, I would love to get a coupon during a layover, for sure.
Speaker 1:So, that's a great you know example of how those kind of personalization things can hit people where it's, adding value for everyone involved, for sure, awesome. So what are what are the most common reasons that loyalty programs, in your opinion, fail to meet their goals, and how can you know some of your? You know how can brands address those issues?
Speaker 2:You know, I think that you know specifically in travel, right so, how Coca-Cola runs their program. I'm, you know, I think that you know specifically in travel, right so, um, you know how Coca-Cola runs their program. I'm, you know no idea, but I think, in, in travel, it's it's making sure that you're matching the consumer need with what you're offering, right. So, um, you know, if you're primarily servicing, uh, north America, right, a lot of consumers stay within North America, so you have to make sure that you're not offering the wrong thing, right. And what I mean is, you know, like, trips to Iceland, as an example, in the middle of December, well, who wants to do that? Right, that's not a big deal.
Speaker 2:You know, um, a trip to Cancun in in August, well, that's hot, like that doesn't? That doesn't match, right, um. But you know, a trip during spring break to Cancun, well, that's different, right. And so I think, I think the trick is, um, the the thing is making sure you're really thinking through the buyer-consumer relationship and what you're targeting with them to actually do. So it's a lot about segmentation of your consumers as well.
Speaker 1:So what do you think is working really well for some of your clients right now when it comes to building successful loyalty programs and strategies, and if you have an example or two you could share, we'd love to hear about it?
Speaker 2:You know, a lot of them are. It's really about promotions and offers and deals and enhancements, right? So if I'm a loyalty member, well, what do I get for that? Right, Airlines are great at this, right. So, you know, if you do X, we'll give you Y Right. Sign up for the gift card, Sign up for the credit card, We'll give you 80,000 bonus miles. If you buy this thing now, we'll give you triple Right, Things like that. And I think that that that is a winning strategy in air specifically, which is, you know, basically rewarding the consumers, right. And the other thing that you see is, as you build up loyalty status, right, that you're getting more and more successful as a consumer in what loyalty you get. Right. So that could be a hotel, that could be, you know, an airline, things like that. So if you're a frequent flyer, you know 25,000 miles, but if you're a you know 1K flyer, you get a whole different kind of rewards, if you will, to maintain that engagement.
Speaker 1:So what do you think are the most critical metrics that brands can be using right now to track?
Speaker 2:the success of their loyalty programs over the course of this year. It's engagement for sure. I think that the biggest thing is are the consumers engaged? I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on in the world and you know we are starting to see in certain spots a little bit of weakness in the market right for travel. And you know the biggest thing is really tracking. Are the users coming back? Are they engaged? Are they shopping? Or is my general user population, you know, are things slowing right in the market? That's the biggest conversation over the last month I've had across every customer, which is do you have a perception that things are slowing down?
Speaker 1:So are there any other metrics that you think are being underutilized or overlooked when people are looking at their programs?
Speaker 2:I think that you know not especially. I mean, you know, these programs are metric driven beyond belief, right? So it's kind of hard to find a metric that you say, well, that's not really working. You know, I always pay attention to things like you know what's the average cart size, how you know what the consumer is loading up on right, and in our case, is it increasing or is it decreasing? And that's an important metric, right, because with what we do, you know, we've got programs that run their average cart size maybe $8,000, right, versus other ones that are doing $600.
Speaker 2:Well, if all of a sudden that starts changing, that might change. You know the Like, when consumers feel that they're flush, right, so flush with cash you know the stock market's going up, things like that they're okay with spending more, right? Well, it's okay to book the five-star hotel, it's okay to do. And there's some consumers that don't care about that stuff at all. But what you'll see is that, as there's, you know, trepidation in the market, little concerns here, concerns there. Now, it's okay to sit at the four-star hotel, right? So instead of the five, we're going to the four, and instead of paying, you know, $500 a night, we're paying $300 a night right, and so any kind of shifts in that dimension is probably something people need to pay closer attention to.
Speaker 1:That's a hard one, though, to assess, so um so, are there any programs out there that you admire or that you're loyal to from you know, in a customer loyalty program, and what do you like about their offerings?
Speaker 2:Um, you know I, I, I don't live on airlines anymore. I used to. Um, you know, I, I, I don't live on airlines anymore. I used to. Um, I think that the airlines do a great job at customer loyalty. They really pay attention to their high value um customers.
Speaker 2:You know, including I don't know a month ago, and I think I've got my book in here, and you know I'm sitting up in the front of the plane. It's a long trip and you know, and this is what I mean by taking care of your customer as a loyalty person, and the I don't have it. The flight attendant, the head purser on the plane I was asleep leaves me a note. Right, dear Mr Outlaw, happy birthday, cause it was my birthday right, signed by the captain with a card right, like, let me tell you, like that, that level of attention to a consumer sitting on your airplane, like that's great customer service and I think that that airline, they just do a good job at that stuff, right, you know? And and I think a lot of loyalty programs can learn from some of those examples right, which is like really paying attention to your, your high value customers in such a consumer friendly way.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. What a cool experience to get that nice personalized thing. I really especially when you're traveling. I'm sure it brightened your day and gave you a little bump for that long flight, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was great so and it, like you know, it had me engaged with her and then I actually took a picture of it with her name and I sent it into United. I didn't hear a reply, but I'm like, you know, this is awesome, right? This is like really, really I believe in that about taking care of your customers, cause I think it's important and you know, it's like nice to see people that that think the same way.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So do you have any closing advice or thoughts on, you know, loyalty programs in general that you want to share with our audience?
Speaker 2:No, I think that you know. I think that travel loyalty right is an important segment of the market right, and it doesn't matter if you're an airline, hotel, a rewards and recognition company or just a general loyalty program that's looking for other ways to engage with consumers, because what we've seen is the gift card reward and the merchandise reward is not as encouraging to the consumer as travel is right. I mean, every one of my travel reward programs that are HR based for rewards and recognition are going gangbuster right, and there's a reason for that because people you know we learned from COVID, right People want experiences and people want to travel right. And so I think that if you're a loyalty program going, how do I get the engagement right? Because people aren't coming back. I can definitely tell you that travel is one of those things that gets those consumers to come back to your site to engage with you, for sure.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So what's next for Switchfly as we move forward in 2025?
Speaker 2:We're closing more deals, right, we've closed eight new customers in the last I don't know six months, um. So for us it's growing and expanding and and launching new programs all around the world, um, and and doing that very successfully. So it's, it's really a growth. We're definitely on a growth curve, um, since we've added this ability kind of to be an all-in-one for a loyalty program. So not only are we the technology, we're everything else that goes along with it. So customer service, fraud prevention, merchant of record, all of that stuff. We're kind of travel in a box. So show up to their doorstep. If you need to plug this in 45 days I can have you live. And that's really interesting because now you have the ability to go faster and engage more brands quickly, right, awesome? Well, we like to wrap up our interviews with our famous quick fire questions.
Speaker 1:I like to try and keep these to a, you know, one word or a short phrase to answer the question. So how would you describe your work life?
Speaker 2:Describe my work life Probably whimsical.
Speaker 1:If you have a day or a week off from work, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm usually outdoors hiking or skiing.
Speaker 1:Nice. If you could live in any city or country, where would you live?
Speaker 2:Pucon, Chile. Very specific Is that for the skiing. There's skiing there, but it's beautiful Nice, If you could go back to school again.
Speaker 1:What would you study?
Speaker 2:I'd probably go to law school.
Speaker 1:Nice. Uh, what facet of your job would you like to know more about?
Speaker 2:Um, probably the psychology of marketing more. And what facet of your job would you like to know less about? Uh, legal contracts.
Speaker 1:Cool. So what motivates you when you're tackling the challenges at Switchfly?
Speaker 2:What motivates me Really? Just, you know, getting things resolved right and like seeing if we can find answers quickly. I'm not a bureaucracy guy, so just getting there, getting an answer and moving on.
Speaker 1:Cool. So what do you draw inspiration from? What really lights your fire?
Speaker 2:uh, I draw inspiration from a friend of mine named bob goff, who wrote love does, which is a book, for you know how you change your life and do do crazy things. So um.
Speaker 1:So what is your favorite sport or hobby?
Speaker 2:Uh, probably well, outdoors hiking, skiing and sailing.
Speaker 1:So and uh, what do you typically think about at the end of the day?
Speaker 2:Probably my family, and then you know, did I do something good today?
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, Noel, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today in our Leaders in Customer Loyalty series. We love having you as part of the Industry Voices podcast. It was really great getting your perspective on customer loyalty and, you know, we look forward to learning more from you and the team at Switchfly throughout the year. Thank you, everyone for tuning in to Leaders in Customer Loyalty today. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the Leaders in Customer Loyalty podcast on your favorite platform and follow Loyalty360 on YouTube and LinkedIn, and then please come back next week for another great episode of the Industry Voices podcast. Thanks again.