2018 Corporate Excellence Awards Supplement

198 CORPORATE VISION / Corporate Excellence Awards 2018 26 C VI I / Issue 9 2018 , Established in2009, thefirst club’s™ (TFC International) digital rewards platformwas launched to provide aneffectiveway topromote customer and employee loyalty, incentive and engagement. In July, TFCwere recognised inCorporateVisionMagazine’s 2018CorporateExcellenceAwardswith the title of “Best Digital Customer Loyalty&Rewards Platform”. On the backof their success, we sought toprofile the company’s innovative approach to engagement solutions. the first club™: Innovative. Engaging. Enticing. Based in London and Santa Barbara, the first club was the first global digital rewards platform that provided a real-world, practical strategy to ‘the engagement problem’ that plagues thousands of businesses. In a world that strives for connections and seems equipped to offer companies the tools to engage effectively and meaningfully with their consumer base, many are missing the mark. In response, the first club (TFC) have reinvented common practice and offer customised enterprise-level loyalty solutions and rewards that can be seamlessly integrated into existing infrastructure. Implementation of the first club’s programmes has resulted in significant, and observable, improvements on engagement and customer loyalty, that has dramatic knock-on effects that carry across the breadth of a business. Indeed, the first club boasts an average 65% increase in customer spending, and a 50% increase in customer retention through their solutions. No paltry figures, by any means. Thanks to its’ innovative approach, the first club’s Clients include Intercontinental Hotels and Resorts, FedEx, Chicago Town and Wells Fargo to name a few, giving a clear indication of the calibre of business that they work alongside. 1808CV23 To learn more about the success of the first club, we spoke to Jill Goldworn, Co-Founder and President of the firm. To start, we asked Jill what she wanted to achieve with the creation of the first club in 2009. “Our mission is to democratize loyalty and reward the world. It sounds lofty but really when brands make rewards affordable, easy to achieve from the first purchase and frictionless to redeem, the customer engagement and ROI go through the roof; and truly key, the customer stays engaged with the brand even when they are not occupied in the primary activity, such as credit card usage and hotel stays. “While Brands spend on average $300 to acquire a new customer, they spend only fraction of that amount to retain them! As we marketing professionals know,