Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

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Thanks, Moya. Welcome, everybody, to Today's Tech and Strategies Behind Enterprise-Wide Loyalty. I'm a product marketer here at Salesforce. And we're joined by a lot of awesome presenters. Maybe we'll start -- John, would you like to kick the introductions off?

Sure. My name is John Joubert. I'm the Commercial Director for Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages. And I have been here for a wonderful 33 years and enjoyed every single moment of it. My role is to work seamlessly with my fellow directors cross-functionally in supporting our sales and commercial team in the creation of and execution of our 5-year strategic plan and then the annual business plan so that we can achieve our defined set of rather ambitious commercial objectives and metrics every year. I have a great passion for our people, for our customers, for our consumers and the communities that we service. And I'm fully committed to one of our core values, which is that of continuous improvement and creating and supporting a digital customer loyalty program in order to ensure an ever-improving service. And value creation to our customers is a great example of that commitment to continuous improvement. So thank you very much for having me, and I look forward to the webinar.

Thanks, John. Christina, would you like to kick things off next?

Hi. Hi there. I'm Christina Bester, and I'm the Commercial Process Lead here at CCPB. I also have enjoyed a long and varied tenure of 18 years thus far. So if -- we kind of have this internal joke where we say there's 2 types of people that work here. There are those that sell Coke and those that support those that sell the Coke. And so I'm one of the biggest supporters working ferociously in the background, making sure that I work with the sales and commercial teams, that we are aligned in terms of process, direction, projects just from a holistic point of view, and then that would lead to sales enablement and business process improvement. I love innovation and love being involved in projects, in change management that are often born from automating manual processes, things such as our SFA tools, in-trade invoicing, EDI, something such as completing a digital cooler request or new customer onboarding, so all of these great innovations that will help drive growth, and obviously, more recently, our customer loyalty program as well as trade promotion management. So there you go.

That's amazing. Thank you, guys, for that background. We're really excited to have you here. Ram, would you like to wrap things up with an introduction of yourself?

Sure. Hello, everyone. Really excited to be part of this webinar today. Thanks, John and Christina, for participating in this. Really appreciate you taking the time. My name is Ram Machiraju. I lead the product management for our customer loyalty suite of products. And I am responsible for the product road map and the investment strategy. Been with Salesforce for close to 7 years, worked in retail, consumer goods in my past life as well as spending about 15 years in loyalty space. And this is really an exciting time to be in this space given the disruption that we are seeing both on the AI side as well as brands really looking to leverage loyalty programs to drive business outcomes. So yes, really excited and looking forward to this -- rest of the conversation today.

Great. Glad we have everyone here. I'm just going to touch on a quick forward-looking statement before we jump into some of the content. But this is just a reminder that Salesforce is a publicly traded company, and you should make all purchasing decisions based off of existing products and services. But with that out of the way, Ram, a little bit of context around what loyalty looks like here at Salesforce.

Sure. So when you look at loyalty programs in general, you would see that there is a gap between what brands are aspiring to deliver versus what customers are expecting. And this is always a catch-up that brands always are looking to deliver to customer expectations. On the program operations side, if you really look at it, brands are really looking at constant innovation so that their program is able to meet the customer expectation. And there are, obviously, some challenges. This is because of the archaic and siloed systems that limit their speed to marketability. If you take simple examples like launching a new promotion, it involves multiple departments, multiple systems. And I have seen programs taking 8 to 12 weeks to launch a new promotion. And after the fact, to really get the insights on how the promotion has performed, it might take a week to get the insights. So many brands are really wanting to leverage AI and insights, but they're also not contextual and they're not grounded on customer data. And that requires a significant lift to leverage the power of AI. That is the second aspect that I see. And lastly, if you really look at it across the board, budgets are shrinking and across departments, and marketers are forced to do more with less. So as a result, programs are not able to really respond to changing customer expectations at the speed that they would like to, be it tailoring the rewards or ensuring consistent experiences across channels or aligning the program with brand expectations. So at Salesforce, we continue to reimagine loyalty, both for B2B and B2C businesses. Our pace of innovation has been really unprecedented in this space. We're delivering a powerful agentic layer for marketers and customers to improve productivity, to improve service levels, lower costs across the program spectrum. Customer loyalty starts with acquisition, and brands are increasingly looking to tap into their existing customers or advocates to lower the overall acquisition cost. So with referral marketing, we are helping brands to acquire new customers at a lower cost. And our end-to-end loyalty program management with external integrations help deliver consistent experiences across the channels. So if you look at companies like Shoe Carnival, Build-A-Bear, Pizza Hut and many, many more across industry verticals, whether it is travel, hospitality, whether it is manufacturing, automobile or retail or financial services, we are seeing tremendous value deploying Salesforce Loyalty. And that actually gets us to the next part of -- so what do we offer, right? So we are actually focused on the entire customer life cycle. With Referral Marketing, we enable brands to lower the cost of acquisition by enabling them to tap into their existing customers so that they can refer their friends and family. With Loyalty Management, brands can drive enterprise-wide loyalty and rapidly innovate on their program. And with global promotions, we are helping brands to unify their promotional strategy, be it pricing promotions or loyalty promotions so that they are able to deliver consistent cross-channel experiences as well as unify their promotional spend.

[Audio Gap] the entire business with every moment of engagement that they have with the brand. Great. Well, let's jump into a little bit of Coca-Cola's story and what loyalty looks like there. John and Christina, strong as yours, I think little introduction is really needed. But could you share just at a really high level what Coca-Cola and loyalty really looks like? And I think you have an awesome video that you have telling your story. So we'll hand it over [Audio Gap]

So just to put in perspective, we are a local -- Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages is a local franchise bottler of the Coca-Cola system in South Africa. We've been operating for 85 years. So we launched in 1940. We employ 1,300 team members and service a very diverse customer base of over 20,000 trading points. And that really made it very necessary for us to pursue additional innovative ways of connecting with those customers and creating that loyalty, which is fantastic. We have a fantastic internal culture and have been accredited as a top employer for the last 15 years. We have a great motto internally, which is people are valuable in direct proportion to their ability to work in harmony with other people. We pride ourselves of being 100% customer-centric and work tirelessly at continuously improving that service and related customer satisfaction that we achieve. We are part of a franchise system. So we work closely with our other bottler, Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa, and The Coca-Cola Company in South Africa. And we live by our purpose, which is to refresh and uplift our communities, inspire moments of happiness and optimism, create value and make a difference that matters. And a lot of what we have designed and embedded in our loyalty program goes a long way in achieving that purpose for ourselves. And I guess looking at our video, Matthew, would be a great way to give a broader background to our loyalty journey.

Yes. That was a wonderful background to start. But yes, let's see what this video has in store for us. [Presentation]

Awesome. What a great video. I'm going to push us on to the next slide here. And Christina, could you maybe tell us a little bit about what we just watched there?

Yes. Sure. No problem. So first of all, the word Eyethu, it means ours, it's ours, and it's -- local South African language is [Foreign Language]. I hope I've got the click right. But it's very appropriate in our market because we refer to it as a partnership program. So it was designed as a shared value model between us and our partners, which are our customers and retailers. So if you win, then I win, and we win together. We launched in September 2023. It took around 9 months -- I call it my baby. It took about 9 months to launch and build. And here in South Africa, generally -- so when we had to design and build it -- here in SA, we've got a lot of business-to-consumer offerings -- so we had to have a business-to-business approach when designing the partnership program. And then -- also, we initially targeted our local and traditional stores. So that's our moms-and-pop stores. So -- which we currently have 8,100 active customers in that channel. So after seeing best practices in other markets and seeing the benefits that they had realized, we decided to do a manual pilot to sense check our thinking and tweak where we needed to before automating and building the technology solution to support that. So we had to be very clear and define what we wanted when using certain guiding principles into the design proposition. Things -- and I know it sounds simple, but things such as, are we using points? Are we using tiers? Are we using both? What type of prizes are we going to be using? Is it going to be cash? Is it free stock? Is it a holiday? So yes -- so it's all pretty inclusive of part of the design. And in the video, you can see we started off with some basic requirements to reach Tier 1. And then to graduate to the next tier level, so Tier 2 and 3, there were other goals that needed to be achieved. The tier calculations are done on a monthly basis. And then we have automatic reward redemption of free stock. So often, programs will have your points or your cash back waiting there for you to go and redeem it and go and fetch it and find it. And often, it results in unplanned rewards. So what we said is it's going to be automatic redemption. And we will deliver and issue that free stock as part of the existing orders on that monthly basis. So -- yes. And then another part of the program was how we communicate and engage with our customers. So we also started using Marketing Cloud to send out the Net Promoter Score surveys as well as to give updates on their loyalty tier status. So that was a mouthful. John, and you, what do you think?

Yes. I think the video is a great culmination of a huge amount of dedicated work from Christina and the team. And it does epitomize what we have created, and it's really exciting. I think what for me stands out in the video is just the passion and the excitement that our team members and our customers -- those are all not actors. They're all customers and staff members that were in that video. But a lot of energy, a lot of passion, a lot of belief in our Eyethu partnership program. And I think that comes through very nicely in the video. And we use that video extensively and continue to build -- bringing more people onto the partnership program. So yes, fantastic. Thank you.

Yes. And I couldn't agree more. What a comprehensive program that you guys have and a really unique and awesome B2B use case. Ram, does anything stand out to you about Coca-Cola Pen Bev's execution of such a robust loyalty program?

Yes. First off, kudos to John and Christina and the entire CCPB team. They've delivered an amazing program leveraging technology to the fullest extent. What stands out in my mind is, one, it's amazing to see how they will leverage the power of Customer 360, breaking down the silos of data, and the loyalty program is embedded in the route-to-market process. With this, the data flows seamlessly from -- if you take, for example, promotion creation to activation when they're leveraging Marketing Cloud, right, or viewing order history along with member profile via sales rep. All of this is kind of together in one place, right? So what it essentially means is that the sales reps are having more time to collaborate with customers and building their businesses rather than doing some transactional activities, right? I think that is outstanding. And the third one is, I think, leveraging the loyalty platform to reward behaviors, right? And what I heard from that is it's not just based on transactional goals, but also other things like ordering online or the frequency, et cetera, right? So it's really a great way of really leveraging the loyalty platform to drive not only transactional behaviors but also certain other behaviors which are nontransactional.

I totally agree. Well, with that, I think we can [indiscernible] that we have prepared for Coca-Cola and Ram today. The first one that I have here is what is the biggest hurdle [indiscernible] a loyalty strategy that you guys have run into with such a comprehensive program?

So Matthew, I think due to the diligence of the team and the massive amount of preparation that was done, including the pilots, including traveling around the world and looking at best practices, eliciting the services of qualified loyalty practitioners, I would say that we encountered very few challenges. For me, there were 2 areas that stood out that needed a greater dedicated focus. And the first one would be the need to have a really clearly defined change management process to ensure the onboarding of the entire organization right from the very top leadership all the way through to this front-facing salespeople. So that for me needed a lot of extra work and focus. And a lot of the success of the implementation was based on the fact that we had that great onboarding and change management process. And then the second part was the ability to accelerate the onboarding of as many of our targeted partners as quickly as possible to gain some critical mass and to start really seeing the benefits because you can use the benefits as a setting tool to get further partners to join. And that was also very well done. And very quickly, we gained a strong commitment to the Eyethu loyalty program. So I'd say less challenges, but just a real focus in certain areas is very important from the Board all the way through the organization.

Yes. Amazing. Christina, what about you?

Thanks, Matt. So from my point of view, the one that stood out was because of our very diverse language -- sorry, diverse foreign national shop owner base, right? So if we look at the languages, sometimes communicating in English wasn't always very well understood. So we try to target 6 of our core languages, so being English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa, Bengali, Somali and Amharic. So Amharic is from Ethiopia. So initially, we tried to translate the English letters in [indiscernible]. I've got some examples here. We tried to translate them into the 6 different languages, but we found it very time consuming. And perhaps it wasn't the quickest and most sustainable way. Yes, you could use AI to translate. But again, to ensure the relevance and to make sure that it -- colloquial nuances are picked up, it wasn't always a sure safe option, making sure that it was well understood and it was actually communicating what we wanted it to. So we are currently exploring different options, such as maybe recording voice notes that could potentially be sent via WhatsApp in these languages, which could be shorter, more efficient. But it still remains a bit of a challenge. So -- but we do continue communicating in English as the business language. Then number two for me, and I'm sure that's with every business and most projects, the word master data comes up. So having updated customer contact details, that is key and core because if you are sending messages to an incorrect number or e-mail address that bounces, you aren't communicating with anybody. So to overcome this, we have created a [indiscernible] process. So every quarter, we create a required task on our SFA tool so that our sales team members can update and complete it when doing their customer visits in their call cycle. And then alternatively, you would have seen also, it was one of the goals and part of the Eyethu program was using mypenbev, the online portal to update the contact details themselves. So yes, those, I think, were mine.

Yes. Thank you both for sharing. I think those are both really interesting examples of also things that other customers are probably also running into. Ram, speaking more broadly here, are some of these themes common across other industries? What other trends are you seeing and challenges that people have when setting up complex loyalty programs?

So I agree with John and Christina. I think these are generally the areas that they have alluded to, right? Change management is definitely a key aspect when you're launching a new program. That too in a diverse environment where you have language barriers and varying technology adoption as well, right? So I like how CCPB has kept the program simple and easy to understand and -- while they roll out more capabilities over time. And this is true across industries as well because the customers, in a B2B environment particularly, take time to really understand what the program, the value proposition, et cetera. The second aspect is zero-party and first-party data that Christina mentioned. For any loyalty program to succeed, brands have to go to length to ensure that they're able to get the insights so that it can inform the loyalty program and you can really tailor the program value proposition based on a good understanding of your customer, right? And so there are a variety of ways like deploying gamification or surveys or quizzes to derive that information and really leveraging or harnessing the power of data and deploying AI to be able to then deliver the results. I think that is going to be the key aspect. And lastly, the reward strategy is also important to balance value and cost, right? And these are things where certain rewards have higher perceived value, but would be at a lower cost. And those are the things that can be really deployed so that reward strategy is also critical.

Yes. Totally agreed. And it's really great that you guys have these challenges [indiscernible] you wanted to focus on so strongly and have solutions for them and are sharing those with everyone here. I think the next question here is going to be talking a little bit about measuring success. So a question to you, John and Christina. After tackling these challenges and having some of these solutions that you had mentioned, what really -- or how did you really measure the success and the impact of this loyalty program to prove all the hard work that you're doing and show incremental increases in whether that be revenue or member retention?

Yes. Great. I mean, obviously, we did this intentionally to benefit from a number of different benefits, both for ourselves and our customers. For me, at a high level, when we introduce a B2B platform or the loyalty program on a digital basis -- for me, measuring the ongoing support for the program and the engagement of both internally and externally with the partner program is really important. I guess in this world, you talk about stickiness to make sure that people are regularly using it. They're engaging in an ongoing basis. For me, that's an important measure that will allow us to be confident of the sustainability and the future success of the Eyethu loyalty program. The second one would be an obvious one would be the improvement in the commercial performance of the customers that join the partnership program. To our mutual benefit, if they win, we win, as Christina said earlier, so that's an important one. And an obvious thing would be -- from a commercial director, is just to see a continuous improvement across our broad commercial metrics being volume transactions, gross revenue, net sales revenue, market share and ultimately, profitability. And I see a massive opportunity when we talk to the future of really leveraging those things to drive really strong incremental profitability, which would allow us then to invest more heavily back into our customer base as well. So again, that will just create a win-win-win scenario going forward.

Great. Yes. And I think those are all really important metrics that a lot of similar customer share. Christina, what about you?

So you would have seen one of the metrics in the video in terms of the membership base. So the first phase was really for us to get as many members on to the program as possible. So we initially targeted 50% of the 8,100 base within that local and traditional market. And we did achieve that goal. So that was great, tick. And now as we currently stand on 5,188 customers, that's equating to 64% of our targeted base. So we are looking at growing it. So now that we have a fairly decent base, the next metric that we want to move is the tier achievement. So we want to see the customers moving from Tier 1 to Tier 2 and Tier 2 to Tier 3. And by doing that, we'll have to work very hard at making sure that our customers and our sales teams understand how the program works, what -- I just need to do that one last thing and then I'll move on to Tier 3, and then I'll get my 2% of gross revenue. So it's really moving the upward tier movement so that the customers can start reaping more benefits. Customer satisfaction is also a great measure of success. We actually -- so we have an annual customer satisfaction survey normally done at the end of each year. We telephonically contact 756 customers. And it's a solid survey. And for last year, we actually hit our all-time high. We were on...

90%.

Yes, yes. So with that, we intend to have more dedicated surveys for the Eyethu partnership program customers and understanding more of the wants and what makes them tick. And then, of course, the improvement of those 12 goals, so to start seeing trends in that line.

Yes. I mean those are some really impressive metrics around adoption and participation and obviously customer satisfaction. So those are really, really awesome, and super excited that you guys have had so much success, especially recently. Ram, could you elaborate maybe a little bit on what measures of success jump out at you and maybe what you see more broadly people looking at when they're trying to measure how successful a loyalty program is?

Yes. I mean, first off, congratulations to the CCPB team for exceeding their launch year goals on acquisition and customer sat and other metrics. I think the metrics you focus on depend on the life stage of the program, right, and also depends on the market and the industry. And within Salesforce Loyalty, we have about 40 dashboards to really look at various metrics around program, member promotions, partner -- if there is a partner ecosystem in place, right? I think in the context of a B2B program, what John mentioned, such as volumes, transactions, revenue or program participation or market share, I think these are really important, in addition to what I call as cost-related goals such as case deflections or orders that are delivered through self-service or -- so some of those things also need to be taken into account. And that is a common trend that we are seeing across B2B loyalty programs.

Thanks, Ram. All right. So we have 2 more questions for today. The first one here is talking a little bit about the future of where Coca-Cola is looking -- or looking at going. John and Christina, well, you talked a little bit about this. And I'm super excited for you to share with us where you guys see the future of Coca-Cola Pen Bev's loyalty program going here in the near future.

So I would see a future where every single one of our customers, no matter what channel they come from, is participating in some tailored, diversified loyalty program based on Salesforce Loyalty Cloud, for sure. The way we're going to do that is we're going to use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to broaden the customer base that are willing to join the partnership program by being able to segment them and targeting very specific customer groupings or channels. So the second part of that would be based on that segmentation, we need to be defining very different and tailored loyalty program goals for each of those customer or channel groupings. And that will allow us to target different customer groupings, for sure. One thing that we started doing in building our data lake, but I've seen this working very well in some of the bottlers in South America. But based on the data gathered through the B2B program, which we -- platform, which we launched in 2019 and Eyethu, which we launched in 2023, is to start generating the robust data lake that will allow us to use AI to start doing suggested orders by customer, which again, just creates a whole lot of efficiency. And people aren't worrying about the actual order. They're worrying about upping the order or selling and promotional activity, et cetera. So that's definitely very, very high on our priority list and not far out of our reach at this particular stage. And then I'd like us to believe that we've got a whole host of consumer, shopper, customer insights that we can use to segment our loyalty goals, and Christina will touch on it a little bit later, to tailor the results and the rewards such that we're able to meet and exceed very diverse customer needs and expectations through the loyalty program.

Yes. All of that's super exciting. Christina, would you care to elaborate?

Okay. Sure. I was also going to talk a little bit about the use of AI. And I know everyone talks about it, but we actually got a bit of a taste of it in February last year where we used a WhatsApp communication channel. It's an application called, Stubber, which integrated the WhatsApp engagement piece into Salesforce marketing. And we found that it was a very quick and easy way for -- to get customer consent and sign-ups for customers that wanted to join the program or to register for the mypenbev platform. It was just a pilot. It is still very expensive. I'm not going to lie. So we couldn't sustain it just yet. I'm sure, hopefully, it will get more affordable as time goes by. But what we found is that the customers engaged with it organically. It didn't feel like the one-dimensional chatbot as we know it, press 1 to do this and press 2 to get a statement. It was like having a conversation. And it could pick up on anything that it was prompted with. So we saw it in action, and it was very encouraging. So we definitely foresee having more use cases in that line so that it's not just a customer asking about the partnership program, but we can expand it to, say, if the customer wants to know their account balance or their cooler was broken and they take a photo of the tag and that it could automatically -- coming back to the Customer 360, it could log a service request and then the field service technician could go out. So all of this is certainly possible. And yes, we definitely see that on the road map and really leveraging the Customer 360 ecosystem. And then that would also boost the customer engagement and the convenience of them, getting things done quicker. In the second part, which -- I know, Ram, you actually spoke about the rewards. So we certainly do want to revisit, reshape and customize the rewards. So currently, based on the pilot and based on the feedback we have received, we give free stock because for customers, that's really seen as 100% profit and they can resell it at full price. So they love that. But we also want to make sure that the program and the rewards is exciting and that we can expand it not just on to the hard benefits, but include some softer benefits. I mean if you can imagine, how -- as our Coke brand, we could make customers feel very special and exclusive by giving them sneak previews and advanced notice of new products, any enhancements. They could skip the queue on certain sign writing or new coolers that have landed. So those are also some of the softer things. And then more recently -- actually, I've got to ask John to break the news. John, what's the breaking news?

So yesterday morning, there was a global announcement made by The Coca-Cola Company that they've entered into a global sponsorship of the Springbok brand. That's our national rugby team. So the Coca-Cola brand will now be the official sponsor of the Coca-Cola Springbok rugby team. And that's the senior team, the women's team and the junior teams, which allow us to leverage that in terms of our customers as well. And we believe there are fantastic opportunities of bringing some of that sponsorship into the loyalty program, whether it's the opportunity to get signed jerseys or a meet and greet or something like that, which is fantastic. So that's very, very exciting. I've still got goose bumps on my arms. And we really look forward to leveraging that and many other assets and getting really creative around the reward system. I guess that ties back to what I was talking about having the segmented approach and really understanding what really works with this group of customers and tailor the goals and the rewards such that we optimize the value that we create for them and ourselves.

Yes. Well, congratulations on the sponsorship. That's super exciting. And all the exploration that you guys are doing with AI as -- everything is evolving inside of loyalty and in martech in general. So that's all really, really great to hear. And I think Ram actually has a couple of slides that he's going to touch a little bit on, the future of how we see loyalty. And honestly, a lot of similar themes that you guys were just mentioning about the future of your program, I think we'll touch on a little bit here. So Ram, I'll hand it over to you for the next couple of slides to walk us through that quick.

Absolutely. And I'm really excited about the innovation that we are doing here at Salesforce in loyalty management space. In the interest of time, I'll highlight just 3 key innovations, the first and foremost being the investment in generative AI. With Salesforce, with our Agentforce platform, we can significantly improve productivity, enhance customer service and experiences. So we leverage our Einstein AI platform, which in turn leverages the OpenAI ChatGPT to understand the conversational language. What we have done is onboarded loyalty topics to enable translation to loyalty actions. And in the parameters -- actions and parameters so that the conversational inputs can be mapped to appropriate loyalty actions. So these topics can be added by the administrator to make this feature available to all users. And not only that, customers can build their own agents, and that is the beauty of this. Customers and partners can take our Agentforce layer and then be able to really expand to their unique cases in a no-code and low-code manner. The second one I'm really excited about is what we call as engagement trails. So this helps brands to drive profitable behaviors. In the case of CCPB, they talked about some of these behaviors like ordering online or ordering certain multiples of quantities, et cetera, right? So it really helps them drive behaviors and also drive member engagement. So simply put, you can define a series of activities that a member needs to complete and earn rewards not only along the way, but also on completion of all the activities. So if I have to extrapolate in the case of Coca-Cola Pen Bev's example, it can be a member can join the program, provide their profile data and place the first order online. So when you do all of these 3 steps together, you not only get individual benefits or rewards, but you also get an additional bonus. So this feature really gives that ability to drive any kind of behavior and also track over a period of time. And then the last one that I want to highlight here is the coupons capability. So we had a robust voucher capability, but we have now added coupons so that you can get immense flexibility on how you want to drive promotions. So you can predefine coupons or if you are working with a third-party partner, you can import those coupons from external systems and then you can associate that to promotion. So -- and the POS, you can quickly validate whether that's a valid coupon or not. You can also control liability by defining how many coupons you want to issue away as a result of that promotion. So these are some of the key innovations. Of course, there are many, many more. But in the interest of time, Matt, I thought these are the top 3 that I wanted to highlight as upcoming innovation.

Yes. I think these are all really great and exciting for the industry. So thanks for touching on that piece. And I know we're running a little bit short on time. But I do want to ask our final question that we had for the main section of our webinar today, and that's really just a piece of advice that everyone has for anybody who's looking to either [indiscernible] loyalty strategy or tech stack. I'm going to ask John, why don't you [indiscernible] question.

Yes. We put up a slide there with 10 key learnings for us or absolute must-haves. The obvious one would be the top one, which is full executive support of the program, which was very important. And then we sell Coca-Cola. So we very quickly realized that we needed to enlist the expertise of a certified loyalty marketing professional, somebody who's built and done the loyalty things, to understand the processes, et cetera. It was great to engage in the right technology, which was also very important. But those top 2 for me were very important because we had the full Board support and then that we had a very talented guy who had done a lot of loyalty programs in his career that really helped us hone in on what we needed to focus on. So very important. Christina?

Yes. This is a great list. Go ahead, Christina. Yes, I think you had some.

Christina has got a couple of favorites herself.

I was going to say number four, keep the design and the structure simple. It sounds so easy, but you can -- it can become very complicated very quickly. So you have to keep it simple because you have to remember there's a person on the other end that needs to understand it. And then also, if it's simple, then number six, you can engage with the customers, you can communicate it, you can promote the program properly. And then number seven, which you've seen in the video, is that we invested in Salesforce where we had the majority of our data in one place to manage and track customer activity. Thank you.

Yes. I mean -- I think all of these are so great, and especially the one you were just mentioning before about keeping it simple. We found -- I had to go back and look at the statistic, but it was showing that like customers were actually preferring loyalty programs that they could easily understand over higher discounts. So it's obvious that people really want something that's intuitive and something that they can get behind. Ram, any final piece of advice for you for anybody looking to implement or enhance a strategy?

I think every program is different, and that's what makes that program unique and -- for their brand. But there are some common themes and -- the ones that Christina and John have already highlighted. One is invest in data, right, and harness the power of data so that you can really fully leverage the power of AI and agents to scale your program. And then the third one is having an integrated approach to loyalty program so that you can deliver the full benefits of the program across the enterprise. And to be able to do this, I think essentially, what it means is you need to have a very flexible, scalable and extensible platform so that you can innovate on your program on a constant basis because every brand has that secret recipe that is so unique to them that nobody else can replicate. And that is where the flexibility and the extensibility of the platform matters because before the competition catches up, you're able to do that, leveraging the power of the platform.

Yes. And I feel this is especially relevant today with how [indiscernible] coming out, especially with AI and agents. All right. Great. Well, before we jump into some really quick Q&A, I did want to share a couple of resources that we have here today. In the side bar, you'll be able to click some of the links that Moya was talking about before. We have our IDC and SPARK Matrix reports, which both ranked us as leaders. So feel free to click those and read a little bit about why. And then we also have a free trial offering, which is really exciting. It gives you hands-on experience with either a full-feature configured experience, where you'll see a bunch of sample data and see how it looks like on your solution, or you can get a full-feature unconfigured environment, where you can work from scratch to see what built inside of Loyalty Management could look like. So make sure to check out those links. I'm [indiscernible] Q&A for just a couple of really quick questions before we wrap things up. So I'm going to scroll here. And John, question for you [indiscernible] the internal buy-in and resources required to build out such a comprehensive loyalty program?

Yes. Matthew, we started with an external consultant doing a full Customer 360 satisfaction and needs analysis. And out of that came quite a strong feedback from our customer base that they were looking for some form of loyalty recognition and way of engaging. So from that particular intervention, we introduced our B2B platform, and then we started to go and benchmark best practice in loyalty. We managed to convince the Board that -- they allowed us to do a manual pilot to test the sort of ROI on a potential bigger investment. Based on the results of that, we got the Board approval to go ahead, which was fantastic. We had great support from The Coca-Cola Company. They identified us as somebody who could set a best practice to be replicated in other markets. We then did really good best practice visits to bottlers in South America, even Morocco, Spain. Very different methodologies, but we got an essence of what was really important, which is fantastic. We then embarked on a very strong change management process right from the Board. We had their buy-in and we -- Christina and her team did a great job selling it both internally and externally. And we were able to build this picture of the journey, but more important, we were able to have a business case with significant return on investment upside based on the incremental performance of the partners on the partners program. And that's really how we got the buy-in and the participation and the ongoing support for Eyethu. So we need to keep working on it. It's something that needs lots of oxygen. But there's a lot of enthusiasm behind what this can deliver for us going forward, especially when we start implementing some of the future plans that we mentioned early on.

Yes. That's super impressive. I have maybe time for one more. So let me read here. This one is how did your existing [indiscernible] in Salesforce?

Okay. I'll take that one. So -- all right. So if I think back in 2013, we originally went live with the Salesforce Customer 360 Sales Cloud. And from there, we were able to integrate our customer master data and other critical master data from our SAP into Salesforce. And at the time, we were using an integration platform called Easyflow. And more recently, we've transitioned to Azure integration services. And so we basically use SAP as our system of record and then Salesforce as our system of engagement. And then over time, as you may have seen on one of those -- that end-to-end connected experience slide further upfront, over time, it just made sense that we leverage the Customer 360, keep all the data in one central spot. And then from there, I mean, we've evolved now to the loyalty program that was able to track all the customer data in one spot. There was just one piece that wasn't there. And you would have heard us make reference to RED. That's -- in our world, that's right execution daily. We use a separate application for execution data and photo recognition. And we needed to integrate those -- that data and those results via an API. But the integration was not a problem at all. It comes through and then we're able to visualize it and bring it into the tier. So that's it, more or less.

Great to hear that. Thanks, Christina. Yes, it's great to hear that all those integrations and all the pieces [indiscernible] loyalty program, like business have come together so well for you guys. With that, I did want to thank John, Christina, Ram, all of you for joining me today. It's been super insightful. And I also wanted to thank the audience as well. So I hope everybody got a better idea of what today's tech [indiscernible] loyalty lens. I'm [indiscernible]. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone, for joining. Please be reminded to fill out today's survey. And feel free to check out the resources that Matthew has recommended. Also, you will all receive a link to watch today's presentation on demand. Thanks again, and have a great day.