Cécile Henry, IBL Group Loyalty Manager, was interviewed for the podcast “Loyalty during COVID-19 and beyond”. This series is produced by Truth, a boutique consulting business specialising in customer-centricity strategy and customer loyalty programmes in South Africa. In this interview Cécile Henry explained what actions wiiv – the largest loyalty programme in Mauritius – has put in place for its loyalty members during COVID-19.

In the context of loyalty, how have your company IBL and the loyalty programme wiiv been affected by COVID-19?

As a Manager of wiiv, when I started seeing the situation in Europe – even one week before the confinement in Mauritius – we decided to stop all the promotions. For us, it was not relevant and not decent to be in a promotion mode. We started preparing a new way of communicating with our clients. We knew we would have to be reactive for our two main partners, the supermarket chain Winner’s and the pharmacy chain MedActiv, which are two essential services in the crisis. There was a lot of information at the beginning, like opening hours that were changing every day. The impact was strong for some partners like coffee shops and hotels which are closed. But we still had a lot of activities on the card because of the supermarkets and pharmacies.

As the leader of the wiiv team, what have you actually done to help your customers through the wiiv programme during COVID-19?

We started with #wiivCares communication and we were on the human side, trying to give tips to our members to go through this situation. We saw many good reactions. Our social media engagement increased a lot during this period and we received private e-mails about our newsletters. Our call centre had to answer to our members on our partners’ like Winner’s and MedActiv and how it would work during the lock down. There was a bit of panic because all businesses were closed for one week in Mauritius including supermarkets. We also supported the two foundations of our programme via donation campaigns. In Mauritius, one of the main solutions in this situation is solidarity, and these two foundations work a lot on the field to give food to the people in need.

Do you think there is more that industries or businesses like IBL and wiiv can do if they work together?

I truly believe that. I really think that together we can be geniuses to find solutions. In all our teams we have people with good ideas and competencies that can work on other projects.

wiiv has almost 16% of the active population of Mauritius on the programme. We’ve got the role to communicate about this situation. For example, one of the things we should work on – and I started sharing ideas with our partners – is how to promote Mauritian products. It’s important that Mauritians buy Mauritian products to keep companies alive so that they can keep employments. I think wiiv has a beautiful platform to promote some products or services. It’s one of the things I would like to work on with our partners to see how we can be platform for them and the Made in Moris. I think it’s our role and one way of working together on this is to use our database to do our part to save our economy.