What Loyalty Members Actually Expect From Personalisation

A paper punch card treats every customer identically: the same stamp, the same reward, regardless of how often they visit or what they buy. Increasingly, that's not what customers expect once they've joined a loyalty program.

Personalisation has become the baseline, not the bonus

McKinsey & Company's research on personalisation found that 71% of consumers now expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and 76% get frustrated when that doesn't happen. It's no longer a nice-to-have differentiator; it's what "being a customer" is assumed to mean, and joining a loyalty program only raises the expectation further.

Australians know personalisation is being automated

For Love or Money™ 2025 found that 66% of Australian loyalty members are already aware of AI being used to enhance their loyalty experience, with personalised rewards and smarter product suggestions among the uses they recognise. Expectations have moved: 73% of members say programs have improved in recent years, up from 51% in 2017. A paper card structurally can't compete with that, because it can't remember anything about the individual customer.

Why this matters for small business

A digital platform automatically knows what a customer buys, how often, and when they last visited, which means personalisation stops being a manual task and becomes a byproduct of simply digitising the loyalty card. The businesses that meet this expectation are the ones that convert casual visitors into genuine regulars.