A Study on Efficiently Designing Customer Rewards Programs

고객 보상프로그램의 효율적 구성에 관한 연구

Currently, the rewards programs offered by many companies to strengthen customer relationships have been working quite well. In addition, many companies' rewards programs, designed for stabilizing revenue, are recognized to be effective. However, these rewards programs are not significantly differentiated between companies and there are no accurate conclusions currently, which can be made about their effects. Because of this, a company with a customer rewards program may not comprehend the true level of active participation. In this environment some companies' rewards programs inadvertently hinder business profitability as a side effect while attempting to increase customer loyalty. In fact, airline and oil companies pass on the financial cost of their programs to the customer, and as a result, they have been criticized publicly. The result of this is that the corporations with bad rewards programs tend to get a bad image. In this study of stores' rewards programs, we centered our focus on the design of the program. The main problem in this study is to recognize the financial value of the rewards program and whether it can create a competitive edge for the companies despite the cost issues experienced by them. Customers receiving financial rewards for their business may be just as satisfied with a particular company or store versus those who are not, and the program, perhaps, does not form a distinctive competitive advantage. When the customer is deciding between competing companies to secure their product needs with, we wanted to figure out how much of an affect a valuable reward program had on their decision making. To evaluate this, we set the first hypothesis as, "based on the level of involvement of the customers, there is a difference between customers' preferences for rewards programs." In the results of Experiment 1 we saw that in a financial compensation program for high-involvement groups and low-involvement groups, significant differences appeared and Hypothesis 1 was partially supported. As for the second hypothesis that "customers will have different preferences between a financial rewards programs (SE) and a joint rewards programs (JE)," the analysis showed that the preference for JE was significantly higher than that for other programs. In addition, through Experiment 2, we were able to find meaningful results, which revealed that consumers have shown a significant difference in their preferences between SE and JE. The purpose of these experiments was to enable the designing of a rewards program by learning how to enhance service information distribution and strengthen customer relationships. From the results, there should be a great amount of value for future service-related endeavors and academic research programs. The research is significant, because the results can be found to have a positive effect on reward program designs however, it does have the following limitations. First, this study was performed using an experiment, and all experiments have limitations. Second, although there was an individual evaluation and a joint evaluation, setting a proper evaluation criteria was difficult. In this study, 1,000 Korean won (KRW) in the individual evaluation had a value of 2 points, and, in the joint evaluation, 1,000 KRW had a value of 1 point. There may have been alternative ways to differentiate the evaluations to obtain the proper results. In this study, since there was no funding, the experiments were performed orally however, this was complementary to the study. Third, the subjects who participated in this experiment were students. Conducting this study through experimentation was unavoidable for us, and future research should be conducted using an actual program with the target customers.

본 연구는 보상프로그램의 구성에 관한 연구이다. 이를 위해 재무가치적 보상프로그램과 서비스 가치적 보상프로그램에 대한 관여수준별 선호도를 분석하였다. 또한 보상 프로그램의 평가모드(SE, JE)에 따라 선호도가 어떻게 달라지는지를 파악하였다. 실험결과 관여수준에 따라 보상프로그램에 대한 선호도는 일부 차이를 보이고 있으며 결합된 보상프로그램에 대한 선호도가 높게 나타나고 있었다. 여기서 특이한 점은 재무적 보상프로그램에 서비스 보상프로그램이 결합되는 경우에 고객들은 보상프로그램에 대해 보다 더 높은 선호도를 보이고 있어, 기존 재무보상 중심에서 벗어나 서비스 보상프로그램에 대한 관심을 제고시킬 필요가 있다. 이는 기존 기업들이 비용에 대한 부담을 갖고 있으면서도 비차별적이로 획일적인 보상프로그램을 진행하는 방식에서 새로운 보상프로그램을 구성하는 계기가 될 수 있을 것으로 판단된다.