Choose Your Loyalty Consultancy Very Wisely

The Conversation That Happens Too Late

Most of the conversations about loyalty consultancy disappointment happen after the engagement. After the strategy document has been delivered and is sitting unimplemented on a shared drive. After the re-platforming recommendation has led to a technology selection that does not deliver what was promised. After the programme redesign has been implemented and the metrics have not moved.

Almost all of these disappointments are predictable. Not because loyalty consultancies are universally poor at their work, but because the selection process that most brands use to choose a loyalty consultancy is not designed to identify the practitioners who will deliver genuine commercial impact. It is designed to identify the practitioners who are best at being selected.

68% of brands who engaged a loyalty consultancy in the past three years said they would not use the same firm again, primarily citing a gap between promised and delivered impact. (TLP Market Survey, 2023)

Why the Standard Selection Process Fails

The typical loyalty consultancy selection process involves a brief, a credentials presentation, a proposal, and a reference check. This process is reasonably good at identifying consultancies with relevant sector experience and the ability to produce polished deliverables. It is poor at identifying consultancies that will actually change programme performance.

The credentials presentation is curated for maximum impressiveness. The proposal is designed to win the business, not to accurately represent what will be delivered. The reference check is with clients selected specifically because they are satisfied. None of these inputs give the procuring organisation a reliable signal about the quality of day-to-day work, the accuracy of the recommendations, or the commercial impact of the engagement.

The 10 questions below are designed to surface the information that the standard process misses.

The 10 Questions

1. Can you show me a programme you redesigned and the before-and-after metrics?

Any consultancy worth hiring should be able to provide anonymised but specific evidence of commercial impact from previous engagements. Aggregate case studies and client logos are not evidence. Ask for specific programme metrics: active member rate, redemption rate, NPS, churn rate, before and after their intervention, with a credible attribution methodology. If the consultancy cannot produce this, either they have not measured the impact of their work or the impact was not significant enough to measure.

2. Who will actually be working on our account day to day?

The most common disappointment in consultancy engagements is the bait-and-switch: senior partners with genuine expertise and impressive track records sell the work and establish credibility in the pitch, then day-to-day delivery is handed to junior team members who are developing their skills on your budget. Ask explicitly for the CVs of the specific individuals who will be doing the work, not just the partners. Insist on contractual naming of key project team members and a notification right if they change.

3. Have you worked with a brand of our size, complexity, and sector before?

Loyalty consultancies have genuine specialisations, and honest acknowledgement of them is a positive signal. A firm that is excellent with enterprise retail may struggle with the governance complexity of large regulated financial services businesses. A firm with strong mid-market credentials may find enterprise programme governance challenging. Ask specifically about experiences that match your context and probe for what made those engagements difficult.

4. What is your technology vendor position?

Some loyalty consultancies have formal or informal commercial relationships with specific technology vendors: referral fees, revenue shares, partnership arrangements, or simply advisors who came from vendor backgrounds and have strong vendor preferences. These relationships create genuine conflicts of interest in technology recommendations. Ask directly: do you receive any commercial consideration from any loyalty technology vendor? A genuinely vendor-neutral consultancy has no reason to be evasive about this.

5. How do you measure success, and what happens if you do not achieve it?

Push for output metrics, not input metrics. Delivering a strategy document is an input. Improving active member rate from 38% to 52% within 12 months is an output. The best consultancies are willing to have at least a portion of their fee contingent on outcome delivery. A consultancy that refuses any outcome-based element of its fees is telling you something important about its confidence in the impact of its work.

6. What do you think we are doing wrong, right now?

Ask this question before you have shared your brief, or early in the first meeting before you have provided significant context. A good consultancy will have reviewed your publicly available programme information and will have a preliminary view on where the opportunities lie. If the answer is entirely generic, that is a signal that the consultancy has not done the pre-work that genuine expertise requires.

7. Can we speak to a client who had a difficult experience with you?

Every consultancy will provide reference clients who are satisfied. Ask specifically for a client where the engagement did not go entirely to plan: where a recommendation did not work, where the timeline overran, where the deliverables needed to be revised. How the consultancy handled difficulty tells you far more about what it will be like to work with them than how they handled success.

8. How does your team stay current on loyalty market developments?

Loyalty is a fast-moving field. The consultancy advising you should be continuously scanning for new technology, emerging mechanics, regulatory developments, and competitive intelligence. Ask specifically: what have you learned in the past six months that has changed how you advise clients? The specificity and depth of the answer will tell you whether you are dealing with a team that is genuinely current or one that is trading on knowledge developed several years ago.

9. What is your data and confidentiality approach?

A loyalty programme engagement involves sharing some of your most commercially sensitive data: member behaviour, programme economics, competitive positioning, technology architecture. Ask specifically about data handling, storage, NDA terms, subcontractor data access, and whether any insights from your engagement will be used in anonymised form in the consultancy's own research or marketing. Understand exactly what you are sharing and with whom before you sign anything.

10. What will our team be able to do independently after this engagement that they cannot do today?

The best consultancy relationships build internal capability rather than creating dependency. If the honest answer to this question is nothing, you will need us to implement any further changes, that is a commercial model designed to serve the consultancy, not you. Look for partners who are explicit about knowledge transfer, who treat training and capability building as deliverables rather than add-ons, and who measure success partly by how much less you need them over time.

The Brief Quality Test

The single most reliable predictor of a successful consultancy engagement is the quality of your own brief. A poorly defined scope, unclear success metrics, and ambiguous decision-making authority on your side will produce a poor outcome regardless of consultancy quality.

Before you interview consultancies, invest the time to get your brief right. Define what success looks like in specific, measurable terms. Identify who in your organisation has the authority to approve recommendations and commit to implementation. Establish a realistic timeline and budget range. The clarity of what you need is the foundation that everything else is built on.

The right loyalty consultancy is the one that makes your team smarter, not the one that makes itself indispensable.

Continue the Conversation

If you are currently evaluating loyalty consultancies and want to pressure-test your selection process, or if you have strong views on what separates genuinely good consultancy from expensive shelf documents, TLP Collective is the right place for that conversation. There are practitioners in the community who have been on both sides of the consultancy table and have perspectives worth hearing before you make a significant commitment. Join at tlpcollective.co

TLP Collective is the professional community for loyalty, CRM and customer strategy practitioners. Join at tlpcollective.co