The customer loyalty journey - technology enabled loyalty touchpoints

Technology increasingly dominates the customer loyalty journey. In this chapter, we provide a conceptualization of how technology-enabled loyalty touchpoints (TELTs) drive customer lifetime value (CLV). Starting with a brief history overview, we highlight successive waves of innovation which led to the growth of TELTs and its impact on CLV. Classifying TELTs on the dimensions of personalization and network effects, we propose a technology-enabled virtuous loyalty cycle as a possible unifying framework to explain the rise of TELT marketing. Using this framework, we delved into a future research agenda around four emerging TELT technologies, namely Augmented (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), chat- and voice-bots, self-service-technology, and real-time customer analytics; which constitute the upcoming fifth wave of TELT marketing.