For over three years, Thailand and its people have been fighting COVID-19, which has had massive impacts on lifestyles and the economy. Even though today, the epidemic is still not 100% eradicated, the general situation is improving, both from the public’s efforts to adapt and keep abreast of the situation, and the national policy to promote tourism and living in a new normal. Many measures have been relaxed enabling businesses to adapt and deal with the return of normal life in a “Next Normal”, including AIS. On top of developing its smart 5G network to meet the needs of Thai digital lifestyles, the AIS customer loyalty program, AIS Serenade, is forging a new standard of customer care with the strategy “Beyond Expectation”, with rich insight that understands every need. As a result, it has designed services but beyond expectations with the concept to upsize customer privileges. It has achieved this with partnerships to cover every aspect of modern lifestyles – dining, travel, shopping and health. Consequently, AIS Serenade has moved on from a program of discounts to delivering “exclusivity” that is tangible to the customer. This underlines that it has been a strong number one in customer loyalty program for the last 18 years.
Bussaya Satirapipatkul, Head of Customer & Service Management at AIS, explained: “AIS has always been committed to transform the delivery of Serenade customer care experiences over the last 18 years. Experiences must be consistent with the context of the situation, and people’s behavior and lifestyles. This is because the High Value customer segment has high expectations of a superior service. This segment does not satisfy just discounts, but a more exclusive experience which cannot be found elsewhere. Most particularly, when the industry must cope with challenges, whether the COVID-19 pandemic or severe competition, we are required to understand our customers even more deeply. Our work today is not only following the latest trends. We need a method of thinking that delivers Beyond Expectation. We must predict and look into the future to design privileges that customers can really use.”
Bussaya continued, “Our data on Serenade customers exercising their privileges during COVID-19 found that the overall use of privileges grew in every aspect, particularly with the category of Drink and Dessert, which grew 65%. This is where we came up with the Upsize concept to expand privileges to be consistent with customers’ lifestyles. They must cover dining, travel, shopping and health, and there must also be continuous cooperation with every AIS partner to redeem AIS points for a wide range of exclusive privileges. These could be cash discounts, or free products and services such as in the Point Pay program. Thung Ngern stores are now being extended from food and beverage outlets to grocery stores, including those in the Blue Flag scheme, and there will be over 850,000 stores for customers to choose from by the end of the year. Besides our basic commitment to customer care, it is also bringing cash circulation back to local economies by boosting spending power in small merchant stores.”
AIS Serenade is today joining partners in many businesses to collectively upsize exclusive privileges, to deliver the best experience to customers. These include:
- Dining: Partnerships with seven leading food and beverage brands including Flash Coffee, KOI The’, DAKASI, Squeeze by Tipco, The Alley, Fresh Me and Bear House, allowing customers to upsize at up over 360 outlets nationwide. On top of this, customers are now able to exercise their privileges for discounts of up to 20% on healthy food restaurants such as Fuji Japanese and Jones’ Salad.
- Travel: A partnership has been formed with Nok Air to give on-top discounts on passenger tickets of up to 500 THB with exclusive privileges for Serenade Platinum customers all free membership in Nok Smile Plus , limited to only the first 100 applicants. There has also been a collaboration with VietJet Air to give a 20% discount on passenger tickets as well as exclusive privileges on all of the leading travel platforms such as agoda, booking.com and traveloka.
- Shopping: A cooperation with Central App gives customers an extra 12% discount on their first shop with no minimum threshold. Existing customers can get an extra 10% discount on a shop of 1,000 THB up. The optician OWNDAYS, currently popular with young generation, is today giving discounts of up to 700 THB.
- Health: With this item still of great priority for customers, Serenade has been working with hospitals, and well-known platforms to deliver telemedicine services, exclusive privileges on RT/PCR COVID-19 testing, or even discounts on medications, food supplements and even medical face masks which are still required for prevention and to look after oneself. We have brought in Welcare to help deliver safe health care to customers with the service of monthly subscription of face masks delivered to customers’ homes, starting at only 109 THB.
“As COVID-19 situation moves into a post-pandemic situation, customer behavior is being completely transformed to the “Next Normal.” The challenge we have to deal with is to transform our work to keep up with these changes. However, we remain faithful to the principle of applying insight and care, and putting “heart” into everything we offer to customers to be of practical use. The goal of customer relations management at Serenade is not only engagement and maximum satisfaction for customers, but building Brand Love with services and exclusive privileges which are Beyond Expectation,” concluded Bussaya.
AIS and AIS Serenade customers can catch up with many other privileges on the myAIS app, or www.ais.th/serenade
