Continuing its journey to drive customer engagement and devotion for world-leading brands, ICLP has been rebranded as Collinson following the consolidation of Collinson’s loyalty, travel experiences, insurance and assistance businesses. With presence in the Middle East since 1993, ICLP has led the way in helping some of the region’s best-known brands acquire, engage and retain their customers.

A global leader in customer benefits and loyalty, Collinson united its three loyalty brands into one loyalty division to better enable clients to access the breadth and depth of its experience and expertise. In addition to ICLP, this includes the loyalty commerce specialism formerly known as Collinson Latitude, and its customer engagement platform business, formerly known as Welcome Real Time. Other travel experiences brands and platforms, which include Priority Pass^TM and LoungeKey^TM as well its insurance and assistance businesses, now all fall under the Collinson umbrella.

The new identity emphasises one single vision – to approach clients’ challenges with a unified solution which leverages all of the talent, products and platforms within the company to deliver smarter experiences that help the world’s best-known brands acquire, engage and retain their choice-rich customers.

Collinson was founded by Colin Evans and he remains a key part of the business as the Chairman. Colin’s two sons, Christopher Evans and David Evans, joined the business over five years ago and are on the Executive Board as joint CEOs.

Sanjit Gill, General Manager of Collinson, Middle East said: “By merging our loyalty expertise, technologies and unique customer insights into one ecosystem, we are able to truly evolve our loyalty and customer benefits portfolio for clients, so that they can continue to differentiate their offerings and drive commercial value for their businesses.”

Priyanka Lakhani, Regional Commercial Director, Middle East, Africa and India added; “ICLP had a rich heritage in the Middle East spanning 25 years and our core strength now as Collinson lies in the scale of our global customer loyalty and benefits network, which we can leverage and deliver in a unified package across the retail, financial services, travel and insurance sectors. We look forward to continuing our work with clients in these increasingly competitive industries, helping them resonate with their customers and inspire brand loyalty and profitability for years to come.”

To reaffirm its commitment as a global leader in delivering loyalty expertise, Collinson commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a global study into how businesses spanning the financial services, travel and retail sectors are faring with their loyalty programmes. Including data from the UAE and KSA markets, marketing decision makers at organisations with revenues exceeding $300 million were surveyed.

In its first wave of data, which will be published in full in the coming weeks, the study reveals that the majority of organisations are failing to measure the right information to really understand what is driving loyalty, putting customer relationships and profitability at risk. A snapshot of this data includes:

Globally, almost seven out of 10 (68%) marketing decision makers do not have a framework in place to measure loyalty in line with overall business performance. These figures are reflected in the Middle East market too, as 69% of respondents in the UAE and 71% in KSA also do not have a framework of this kind in place.

Furthermore, it appears that organisations are taking a disjointed approach to loyalty, with almost half (49%) of decision makers, both globally and in the UAE, admitting they are failing to collect a sufficient, wide range of customer data. KSA is slightly more advanced at 39%, but these numbers are still far higher than they should be for optimum loyalty programme efficiency.

Collinson will reveal how businesses in the Middle East compare with those globally at employing strategies to strengthen customer relationships; integrating loyalty technologies with other internal processes; and where loyalty programme spend lies among wider business investment priorities over the next 12 months.