Personal hygiene like washing hands, covering coughs and cleaning surfaces is critical to staying healthy during this time. Good personal hygiene practices are also expected to transcend the COVID-19 pandemic and help improve our general wellbeing.

Loyalty program hygiene is no different.

Use this time away from customers/clients to practice proper program hygiene to ensure business strength, health and success into the future.

Here’s three hygiene practices you should be performing to protect your program:

1. Wash your member database

An unwashed member base is like a virus to your insights. Reports will be misleading and decisions can be made without clarity which puts the company at high risk. Cleaning your data is the process of detecting and then correcting corrupt or inaccurate records making sure they’re valid, complete, consistent, relevant and uniform. Basically, without high quality data, there is no way to derive high quality insights. Your reports may end up making your program look sick when it’s not, or even worse, could disguise a sick program as looking well until it’s too late to recover.

2. Re-structure your data

After your data is washed and clean, then you should decide on the best way to structure and store it for optimal use, and to ensure immunity against security risks. Your data needs to be easy to view, sort, filter and manage so that quality and detailed reports, customer profiles and insights can be accessed on demand to support all aspects of the business including marketing, customer service, finance and security & fraud ect.

3. Review your insights

We’re often too busy to take a real deep dive into our data. But most of the answers to our dilemmas can be found in the data we already have available. Now that your data is clean and structured, use this chance to really study it for insights which will help identify key opportunities and inform your future strategic roadmap. For example, have a look at the relationships between certain member segments, product mixes and incrementality. Do some quality member segmentation, member profiling and predictive modelling so that your budget can be more effectively directed. Use your insights and models to reset your benchmarks and success measures for the future.

Good hygiene practices are important always, but now more than ever. It really is survival of the fittest in this world, so use this time now to get on the front foot of your program hygiene practices to ensure your program is in good health for the future.