Perspectives
Closing the Experience Gap: Turning Loyalty Intelligence into Experiential Value
Maegan O’Neill
Loyalty today isn’t short on data—it’s short on usable intelligence. Across every tier, every card type, every club/membership/subscription ...our data shows the same truth: members want to feel seen, understood, and included. Yet too often, experiences still feel transactional instead of transformational.
Through the zero-party and 3rd-party behavioral intelligence we collect across categories—published in part each year in The Bond Loyalty Report™—we see the widening experience gap between what members value and what brands actually deliver.
Cardholders tell us that “making me feel like I belong” and “making the brand experience more relatable” are among the top drivers of great service—outranking traditional ease or effectiveness measures. But fewer brands are connecting those emotional expectations to their first-party operational data, meaning the experiences that matter most are often the hardest to scale.
That’s where loyalty intelligence moves from diagnostic to dynamic. When the same data that powers The Loyalty Report™ is activated within Bond’s engagement and decisioning platforms, it doesn’t just describe what members expect—it delivers it. And increasingly, we've made that data available to Snowflake and Salesforce ecosystems to scale these impacts for our clients.
We see it in the numbers: when members gain exclusive access (71%), instant linking benefits (69%), or partner perks (67%), self-reported AND third-party validated purchase frequency rises sharply. Access is more than an incentive—it’s an emotion engine. It turns loyalty from a points economy into an experience economy.
That’s the promise of experiential loyalty: using intelligence to deliver belonging, not just benefits.
Because data shouldn’t just tell you what loyalty looks like. It should make loyalty feel real.