That kind of behavior change is why investment and scrutiny are both rising. Brands are putting more into loyalty, and they want proof that programs actually change what customers spend. Many have reworked their programs over the past two years to keep pace.

In this blog post, we'll look at the trends reshaping how loyalty programs get built and measured today, including:

• Where points stop differentiating: Why earn-and-burn alone no longer wins, and where brands are investing instead.
• The shift toward relevance: How personalization, premium tiers, and gamified data capture are changing program design.
• What it looks like by sector: How these trends play out across QSR, grocery, and financial services.

Earn-and-burn is losing its edge

The traditional points-for-purchase model is still a foundation, and it no longer differentiates on its own. Every competitor offers a similar earn rate and similar redemption options. Members collect points across multiple programs without feeling loyal to any of them, and most of those programs go unused.

Enrollment runs high while engagement stays selective. Large volumes of unredeemed points point to the same problem. Accumulation without meaningful redemption leads nowhere.

Brands are responding by investing where members actually feel the difference. The active areas are richer rewards value, deeper personalization, experiential perks, and connected rewards ecosystems that tie a program to a wider set of benefits.

Perceived value is shifting in the same direction. Special access and personal experiences increasingly shape how members judge a program. The programs winning today pair financial rewards with experiences members cannot get anywhere else, and the strongest put their most compelling value behind a membership wall. They adjust that approach based on performance.

The personalization gap between what consumers want and what brands deliver

Delivery still lags far behind demand. Most programs fall short here, with plenty offering only basic segmentation and many still serving every member the same generic experience. That gap carries a cost, because personalized experiences shape both engagement and spending.

According to Harvard Business Review and Talon.One, 62% of organizations saw increased sales from personalized promotions. BioTechUSA shows what closing the gap looks like in practice. The supplement brand replaced blanket discounts with personalized incentives tied to each customer's purchase behavior, and synced rewards across online and offline channels. The shift lifted average order value, customer lifetime value, and purchase frequency.

Forrester's 2025 predictions found that 78% of US B2C marketing executives acknowledge their marketing and loyalty technologies are siloed. The data exists, but it sits in separate systems run by separate teams, which makes real-time personalization hard to execute. Forrester projected that investment to unify these stacks would triple as companies move to meet consumer expectations for continuity across touchpoints.

Paid and premium tiers are going mainstream

Premium loyalty used to belong to a small number of standout programs. That is changing fast, and paid or premium tiers are moving into the mainstream of loyalty design.

Premium tiers work when the benefits feel immediate and clearly worth paying for or qualifying toward. That can mean better access or a smoother path to perks members actually use. The strongest paid programs deliver value customers feel throughout the year.

Two models dominate. Paid tiers ask members for an annual or monthly fee in exchange for elevated benefits, which works when the perks pay for themselves through frequency. Earned tiers gate the best rewards behind spend or engagement thresholds. That gives members a reason to consolidate their activity with one brand.

Both models concentrate value on a brand's most valuable customers and protect margins by reserving the richest benefits for the people most likely to reciprocate. The design challenge is making the top tier feel attainable enough to chase and rich enough to keep.

Gamification is becoming a data strategy

For a growing number of loyalty teams, gamification is now a data strategy as much as an engagement tactic. Many brands planning new programs want gamification built in from the start, specifically to capture preference and intent data. Interactive moments give customers a reason to willingly share what they want.

Some brands use gamified challenges and streaks to lift purchase frequency. When those mechanics run on the same logic as points and tiers, the data they generate can feed directly into personalization.

Sephora offers an excellent example. Its Beauty Insider Challenges combine online and in-store actions and connect both transactional and non-transactional engagement to a broader rewards experience. The challenges generated 2+ million new loyalty signups, and participation in the first two tripled original forecasts. The lesson is that gamification works best when it reinforces the core loyalty strategy.

What's happening inside specific industries

The pressures shaping loyalty look different depending on where a brand operates. Margins, purchase frequency, and customer expectations all vary by sector, and so do the mechanics that work. Three industries show how the same trends play out.

QSR: Habit engineering at scale

Quick-service restaurant (QSR) loyalty programs already operate at enormous scale. The competitive question has shifted from whether a brand runs a program to whether that program can move frequency, basket size, and long-term habit. Across the sector, loyalty mechanics are moving past basic accumulation toward more personalized, behavior-driven offers.

Running rewards, discounts, and tests across millions of transactions requires systems that adapt quickly, without routing every change through a long technical queue. That is one reason QSR brands now treat loyalty architecture as an operating decision as much as a marketing one.

Scooter's Coffee does exactly this. The drive-thru chain runs automated Visit Challenges in the background and uses dayparting to push time-specific offers that bring customers back. Real-time fraud detection protects its welcome-drink offers, and none of it requires building each campaign by hand. The payoff for QSR brands is faster launches, centralized tracking, and a consistent incentives experience across ordering channels and devices.

"Talon.One’s API-first Rule Engine has given us the incredible flexibility to automate gamified challenges and detect fraud in real time."

Anne Schultheis

Director of Loyalty and CRM at Scooter's Coffee

Grocery: Loyalty data becomes a revenue stream

In grocery, loyalty data increasingly powers retail media networks. Those networks generate revenue from consumer packaged goods (CPG) partners. Loyalty programs capture what shoppers actually buy, and grocers package that purchase data into targeting and measurement that CPG brands pay to access. The richer the loyalty data, the more valuable the network becomes.

Retaining existing customers and deepening their loyalty now matters more for growth than pulling in new traffic. AI-driven discounting and personalized promotions are becoming more common in grocery, with rewards deployed only where predictive models show the offer will change behavior at the margin.

Financial services: Daily value over aspirational rewards

Younger consumers increasingly expect rewards to be accessible directly through their banking app. They also tend to prioritize digital-first banking experiences.

Programs built around annual fee offsets or aspirational point accumulation don't resonate with this cohort. For many, major milestones like homeownership feel further away than they did for previous generations.

In practice, daily value means rewards members can use right away, like cash back in the account or an instant discount on everyday spend. Perks tied to how someone already banks carry more weight with this cohort than a payoff years down the line. The appeal is immediacy.

McKinsey's Global Banking Annual Review 2025 identifies a waning loyalty loop across consumer banking, as younger customers grow more willing to switch to nonbanks and fintechs and as neobanks earn their trust. The banks that pull ahead will run flexible technology systems. They can launch and adjust reward mechanics quickly enough to respond to market shifts in days.

What sets high-return loyalty programs apart

The programs with the best returns share a few habits:

• Measure incrementality: They track the behavior a reward actually changes, on top of total member spend.
• Personalize on behavior: Personalization runs on what members do more than on demographics.
• Coordinate the whole strategy: Rewards and benefits belong inside the loyalty strategy as one coordinated effort, all working toward the same customer relationship.

With more money flowing into loyalty, every point, tier threshold, and reward now has to earn its place. Each incentive has to demonstrably change behavior. Subsidizing purchases that would have happened anyway no longer counts as success.

For brands ready to leave disconnected tools and siloed teams behind, Talon.One brings promotions, rewards, and engagement logic together on a single platform with real-time decisioning. Marketing teams can build and adjust incentive logic without filing engineering tickets. That is what makes it possible to prove impact and adapt as fast as the market moves.

Most HR and Total Rewards leaders would say they have a competitive program in place. And on paper, many do. But there's a difference between a strategy that looks coherent from headquarters and one that genuinely resonates with employees in every market you operate in. The gap between those two things is where talent is quietly lost.

The good news: you don't need a full program overhaul to find out where you stand. These five questions are a practical starting point.

1. Do your benefits actually mean something in every market?
It sounds obvious, but this is one of the most commonly overlooked gaps in global rewards. A company-sponsored health plan is highly valued in markets where healthcare costs are steep and personal; but in countries with universal coverage, that same benefit carries far less weight. A retirement contribution that excites employees in the UK may be legally inadequate in the Netherlands.

What to do: Pull your benefits utilization data by country. Low enrollment rates in voluntary programs, or high opt-out rates in specific markets, are often the first signal that your offering isn't meaningful. Supplement with a simple pulse survey question: "Do you feel your benefits reflect what matters to you?" The responses by market will tell you a lot.

2. When did you last run a cross-country pay equity analysis?
Pay equity is no longer just a domestic concern. As pay transparency legislation expands (across US states, the EU, the UK, Australia, and beyond) employees are comparing compensation across geographies. And if significant disparities exist without clear justification, you'll feel it in trust, retention, and increasingly, compliance exposure.

What to do: Conduct a cross-country pay equity review at least annually using current market benchmarking data. Look for roles at the same job architecture level where pay varies beyond what local market differences would justify. If your benchmarking data is more than 12 months old, it's already behind.

3. Does your recognition program work for everyone, or just your home market?
Recognition programs are often designed with one culture in mind, typically the company's home market. A peer recognition platform built around public, individual acknowledgment may feel uncomfortable to employees in cultures where modesty and collective contribution are valued. A rewards catalog filled with options that aren't available, relevant, or meaningful locally isn't a recognition program, it's a missed opportunity.

What to do: Review recognition program participation rates by country. Low engagement in specific markets is a reliable indicator of cultural misalignment. If certain regions are consistently underperforming, it's worth running a listening session or focus group to understand what recognition actually means there.

4. Are your employees aware of everything they actually receive?
This is one of the most underestimated gaps in total rewards. Research consistently shows that employees underestimate the value of their compensation when they only think about base salary. Benefits, retirement contributions, equity, flexibility, wellness programs, and learning opportunities all carry real monetary value; but only if employees know about them and understand them.

What to do: Ask directly. A pulse survey question like "Do you have a clear understanding of the full value of your rewards and benefits?" is simple, fast, and often revealing. Compare results by country and by manager level to identify where communication is breaking down, and where manager capability gaps may be part of the problem.

5. Are you measuring the right things?
Many organizations track cost metrics: total compensation spend, benefits cost per employee, compensation as a percentage of revenue. These numbers matter, but they're incomplete. A low-cost program that drives high turnover isn't efficient. It's expensive in ways that don't show up in the rewards budget.

What to do: Build a metrics framework that connects your rewards program to outcomes: voluntary turnover by country, recognition program participation rates, benefits utilization, and employee Net Promoter Score by market. When you can show leadership the cost of an engagement gap in a specific region, you earn the resources to close it.

Where to go from here
These five questions are a starting point. A way to quickly identify where the gaps in your global rewards strategy are most likely hiding. But closing those gaps requires a more comprehensive framework: one that covers pay equity, benefits relevance, recognition design, compliance, and measurement all together.

If you're ready to go deeper, we've put together a practical guide for HR and Total Rewards leaders doing exactly that.

1. Skewed scores create a false sense of customer experience.

2. Overrated successes lead to problematic marketing efforts.

3. Innovation becomes non-existent.

4. Inflated ratings encourage anti-competition

The most successful loyalty programs today aren’t just bidding for the next transaction, they’re focused on building relationships with their members. Here’s where that relationship-building mindset is really showing up in programs: they're rethinking what "wellness" perks even mean, they're personalizing offers without expecting anything in return, they're showing up in the everyday moments of members' lives — not just birthdays and milestones — and they're linking their partners together so the whole thing feels like one seamless experience instead of a catalog of separate deals.

Experiences = the new wellness perk

Open your inbox right now and there's a good chance a bank is offering you some form of "financial wellness" training. I get one from mine roughly every two weeks. It’s not that the sentiment isn’t there – sure, we all could learn to be more financially well. But for most people, being told to think harder about your 401(k) is not restorative. Its homework disguised under nice marketing.

A different definition of wellness is showing up in loyalty, and it looks a lot more like a night out than a webinar. New ticketing partnerships are letting members put points, miles, or cash back toward sporting events, Broadway shows, outdoor concerts - the stuff that really fills people’s buckets. Compare that to the standard model, where "earning" tops out at cash back. It’s an essential part of a loyalty program, but nobody's telling their friends about the 3% cashback they got on skincare.

There's lots of research behind this shift, showing that shared experiences and live events can improve happiness, strengthen connection and support well-being long after the event itself, in ways a discount just can't touch. One loyalty executive told me about her son using points for a meet-and-greet with one of his favorite musicians. Months later, she still has the photos on her phone, and her son says he will never give up the card that gave him that experience. The program gave him an afternoon he’ll actually remember, and he never had to think about the cost. 

That's the distinction most programs still miss: they're built for the consumer, not the customer. A consumer is a set of transactions. A customer is a whole person - someone with a kid who loves live music, a group of friends who watch soccer together, a life that doesn't stop happening between purchases. That's the real trick with experiential rewards: they don't reward a transaction, they attach themselves to a memory. Every major brand piling into ticketing deals and dining reservations is chasing the same thing. Nobody feels loyal to a discount alone.

And when a brand provides an experience you’ll never forget, redemption doesn’t stop there. Burning drives earning. When a member actually uses their points and feels the benefit, they're more likely to start earning toward the next thing. Redemption isn't the finish line, it’s the moment that convinces someone to keep engaging.

Showing up with nothing to sell

Historically, almost all loyalty messaging has been built around a transaction or an offer, like a deal, a deadline, or a nudge to act. But some of the strongest brand engagement doesn’t come with an ask at all. Instead, brands are providing customers with a recommendation just because they thought of them. No discount code, no countdown – something more like “we thought you’d like this” versus “buy this now.”

That distinction is small on paper, but it goes a long way when it comes to building trust. An offer says we want your money, but a recommendation says we really know you.

Sephora does a really good job of this. They’ve bet on truly knowing who you are and what you might like by surfacing products based on your past purchases and browsing. Spotify's Discover Weekly works the same way, without even the pretense of a sale. It's a playlist, not a pitch. No upgrade prompt, no "still thinking about Premium?" banner riding along with it. Just forty minutes of music picked with you in mind, delivered on a schedule you didn't ask for and now expect. Both brands have figured out the same thing: relevance is a retention tool.

When it comes to proving relevance, a recommendation that misses feels worse than a discount that doesn't apply, because it makes it feel like the brand really doesn’t know you. But get it right consistently, and something changes. Your customers stop treating your messages as marketing noise that they want to filter out. 

Fitting into everyday moments

The wellness perks and the no-strings recommendations both point to the same shift: brands treating members as whole people. The next place that shows up is in what members can actually redeem their points for.

Instead of a generic catalog of offers, the best programs are stocking it with brands that actually fit how a member lives: earbuds from their favorite tech brand, a watch that tracks sleep and steps from the fitness brand they already trust, a tracker for a dog's collar. None of these are once-a-year redemptions. A free trip gives someone a great week but a watch earned with points shows up on their wrist every morning for the next two years. The reward doesn't end at checkout, it becomes part of the member's routine, which means the program does too.

That's a different kind of value than cash back or a bigger points multiplier. A discount saves someone money once. Access to brands someone already wanted keeps reminding them, every single day, that the program actually knows who they are. The redemption doesn't fade into a receipt, it sits on a wrist or in an ear, quietly doing the job a one-time perk never could.

This is also where partnerships matter more than catalog size. A good partner doesn't just add another item to redeem, it connects the program to a brand or category a member already cares about. The category is almost beside the point. The logic is: let people redeem points toward brands that already fit their life, and the reward stops feeling like a one-time transaction and starts feeling like part of their life.

One brand was never going to be enough

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're only looking at one program at a time: no single brand can cover everything a member wants out of a loyalty relationship anymore, and that's not a sign that customers are less loyal. It's a sign their expectations grew. They still trust the brands they trust. They just expect those brands to understand more of their life and connect them to more of it, not less.

That's pushed the best programs toward acting like ecosystems. A brand partnering with a ticketing platform, a merchant network, and a consumer tech company is making the case that it understands a member's life outside their own brand. Scale by itself doesn't prove a program understands its customer though. The most important piece here is knowing when to say no to a partner that doesn't fit, even a well-known one.

None of this works if you're chasing whatever a competitor did last quarter. It's tempting, when a rival relaunches or some trend spikes, to react immediately: match the offer, double the points, find a new partner. That kind of move doesn't build a strong enough algorithm.

The programs earning real loyalty are doing something less flashy. They’re staying true to one clear value promise, letting the details underneath it, like offers, timing, personalization, the partner mix, shift and improve, while keeping the core experience recognizable enough that a member who joined six months ago still knows what they signed up for. They're measuring themselves on engagement, repeat behavior, and whether a member's life is actually easier or better, not only on revenue, and not only in year one. They're investing in trust before they ever expect a return on it. 

Points still earn the sign-up, but the kind of loyalty that lasts comes from how much of a member's life the program actually shows up in.

For years, loyalty has been optimized as a program—points, rewards, and offers designed to influence individual transactions. But today’s growth reality is different. Wallets are fragmenting. Customer expectations are rising. And customers increasingly expect brands to deliver connected value across more of their everyday needs.

This is where loyalty as an ecosystem becomes essential.

An ecosystem doesn’t require partners; it requires ecosystem thinking. For some brands, that value is unlocked across a portfolio of owned brands, or product lines (apparel, home, financial services, etc.). For others, ecosystem value is created through collaboration with like-minded brands that extend relevance beyond a single category. The common thread is intentional design—to connect experiences, value, and data that delivers more together.

Shell’s entry into Scene+ is a strong expression of this model. By joining a mature loyalty ecosystem, Shell is creating new ways for its members to earn and save on everyday essentials, extending value beyond fuel and giving Shell greater relevance across customers lives, not just at the pump.

Scene+ continues to transform and innovate, guided by how customers want to engage. Recognizing the importance of choice as a driver in loyalty and member brand experiences, they have intentionally expanded both the depth and breadth of rewards to deliver on what matters most, all across daily spend, experiences and meaningful moments that hold value. Shell’s participation strengthens one of the most complete category sets in the Canadian market, creating value in everyday life.

Our Bond Intelligence reinforces why ecosystem thinking works. Customers are eager to engage when loyalty delivers real value, relevance, and flexibility. Program enrolment remains strong, and activity continues to grow year over year, particularly across high-frequency retail and travel. The rich data asset Scene+ has created enables them to understand their members with a level of clarity that enables relevance at scale, translating insight into engagement, then into growth. According to Bond’s IQ engagement data, Scene+ will now reach an estimated three out of four Canadians in places that they already transact regularly.

As loyalty continues to evolve, the most effective strategies will be those designed as connected systems, rather than isolated programs. Whether built within a brand portfolio or across partners, ecosystems enable smarter personalization, more efficient value creation, and stronger customer relationships.

Data-sharing, co-marketing, and coordinated value creation are elements that are increasingly becoming foundational to loyalty. A loyalty ecosystem like Scene+ allows partnering brands to move faster, learn more about customer behaviours, and deliver connected experiences that standalone programs are struggling to achieve.

Scene+ represents a modern, mature, and material loyalty ecosystem built, not as a promotion engine, but as a long-term customer growth infrastructure.

Agentic AI, defined as AI systems that do not merely surface information but take autonomous action on a consumer’s behalf, is at the center of this structural shift. While full autonomous ordering remains on the near-term horizon rather than a present reality, the foundational consumer behaviors and technology infrastructure that will power it are already forming.

What Agentic Commerce Actually Means for Food Service

The question is whether the organization is building toward this shift. In the most optimistic projections by McKinsey, one in ten dollars spent in U.S. retail could flow through AI agents by 2030.

For today’s restaurants this structural shift manifests across five meaningful dimensions:

From search-and-browse to ask-and-decide. AI tools are already consolidating multi-step discovery into a single, digestible output, meaningfully reducing the cognitive effort required to identify the right dining option.

Personalized ordering without the burden of menu complexity. Digital menus are evolving from fixed layouts into dynamic interfaces that adapt in real time to behavioral signals, contextual factors, and preferences.

Frictionless access pathways become more decisive. According to Mintel research, the ability to order ahead is a major influence on restaurant choice for 41% of US consumers, while drive-thru access, loyalty membership, and third-party delivery app presence each influence 35 to 38% of consumer decisions (Mintel). Agentic ordering is likely to amplify the importance of these by lowering the effort required to act.

Conversational ordering expands across channels and platforms. The digital front door of a restaurant is no longer confined to a brand app or website; it is wherever a relevant conversation can be initiated.

Autonomous ordering will expand, but trust must be earned incrementally. Also reported by Mintel, only 18% of US consumers currently express interest in AI-assisted menu recommendations, and nearly 30% believe that technology detracts from the dining experience, signaling that full autonomous ordering functionality will follow demonstrated trust rather than precede it.

Strategic Priorities for Food Service Leaders

The progression from “AI helps me find options” to “AI completes my order” is better viewed as a strategic ladder. Smaller assistive ordering features like local favorites, “for you” menu categories, and personalized deals, need to come first to generate behavioral familiarity and interest. One of our QSR clients at Bounteous recently saw an 18%-point increase in purchase conversion from users who interacted with a “For You” menu category that surfaced AI-powered suggestions over default menu categories. The brands that invest along this road to hyper-personalized capabilities will be positioned to reap near-term gains.

Three Foundational Priorities

1. Build the unified data foundation that makes intelligent personalization possible.
   Unified first-party data, integrated across ordering, loyalty, and digital touchpoints, is the prerequisite for every intelligent guest experience. Fragmented data produces fragmented AI, and no amount of model sophistication can compensate for a disconnected data architecture.
2. Prioritize assistive AI before autonomous AI.
   The fastest path to agentic ROI is through features that benefit the consumer including smarter reordering, personalized item suggestions, and dynamic menu presentation. These capabilities generate behavioral data, build trust, and establish the baseline for more autonomous features over time.
3. Own the agentic guest relationship rather than ceding it to third-party platforms.
   As agents from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others gain the ability to place food orders across brand ecosystems, brands without their own intelligent ordering experiences risk disintermediation, losing both the guest relationship and the associated data.

The Opportunity Lies in Closing the Gap Between Expectation and Experience

Food service consumers are asking for speed, relevance, and a sense that the experience ‘knows them.’ The brands that consistently deliver on those expectations will build the habitual engagement that drives long-term digital growth. Agentic AI is the mechanism through which food service brands can close the gap between what guests expect and what most current digital experiences deliver. The technology infrastructure is largely in place, the behavioral data is being captured, and the consumer trends are moving in a direction that rewards investment. What is required now is a clear view of which capabilities to prioritize, in what sequence, and in service of which measurable guest and business outcomes.