Australian and New Zealand loyalty customers in 2025 are excited about AI, data-driven efficiencies and real-time customer experiences. They value emotional connections with customers, immediate gratification at the point of sale, and flexible technology platforms that can adapt without constant recoding.
These executives also believe the right technology partner is critical for making a meaningful difference in delighting customers and achieving business objectives.
During the recent 2025 Asia Pacific Loyalty Conference, several senior executives from major Australian and New Zealand companies shared insights about loyalty industry trends and their experiences working with one of the world’s leading loyalty providers, Eagle Eye. Their perspectives reveal both the evolving landscape of customer loyalty and what they value most in technology solutions.
The event featured presentations and expert panel discussions exploring themes including artificial intelligence’s influence on business operations, building meaningful customer relationships, and tailoring experiences to individual needs. Loyalty program customers acknowledged these key AI and data trends whilst also emphasising the importance of loyalty’s fundamental principle: delighting customers.
Efficiency with AI adoption
Speaking to some of the broader loyalty trends, Bronwyn Barbarel, who serves as loyalty, customer experience & brand marketing leader for New Zealand fuel service and convenience station operator Z Energy, said there were some really interesting efficiency gains the loyalty industry stood to benefit from thanks to AI and data.
“However, I think we need to be really careful that we’re not looking for technology to solve things. We actually still need to make business decisions and really clear business goals rather than have technology drive our decisions about what we’re doing,” she said.
“There’s some really neat efficiencies but we need to be driving that from a business point of view first.”
Barbarel also pointed out that it was important to stay focused on creating emotional connections with customers.
“…It’s all about emotional connection and creating those dopamine hits and that lovely moment about leaving on a high. All of those things that when you get deep into the detail of delivering a program, you forget that it’s not about the bits and bites and the connecting and the integrations; it’s about creating that emotional connection,” she said.
“For us getting that reminder coming here this year has been really helpful at a time when we’ve just launched four months ago. [After] getting it out there now it’s about making sure you get that emotional connection between our customer service reps and our customers.”
Brendan Woodward, senior manager, customer rewards and partnerships at Australian multinational road operations company and toll road operator Transurban, agreed that AI was a major trend but was particularly excited about its operational benefits.
“It’s a cliché but definitely AI. Specifically the agentic AI. I am excited about being able to offload a lot of the manual processes that my teams perform onto agents,” he said.
“I think we have a little ways to go before it’s really going to help us save a lot of time, but I’m looking forward to a year or two from now when they are ubiquitous.”
Andrew Stewart, head of digital customer platforms at Australian petroleum company Ampol, said his company had observed that customers particularly valued immediate gratification.
“Customers value something happening in front of them. That’s probably what we’ve noticed the most. Our program allows them to come into the shop and realise a treat or a benefit right away. They’re buying whatever they want from the shop, [and] we’re giving them a treat straight away if they’ve earned it,” he said.
“I think that’s what they really value.”
Janelle Gostelow, a former senior executive at Australian fuel distribution company Viva Energy Australia, said AI presented opportunities to free up teams for more strategic work.
“I think the jargon word at the moment is AI of course, and I’m seeing a lot of use cases for AI. But interestingly I think my view on AI is a little bit different to some of my peers. What excites me about AI in particular is what it’s going to release my team to work on,” she said.
“Instead of spending time on tasks that are repetitive, they can spend time on the exciting things about their jobs that they really love, like the creative elements, the campaigning, how we connect better with customers; that thinking piece [where there’s] a human element. I can get rid of all the boring things that are about setting things up and administrative tasks from their day.”
AI Customer Loyalty Platform Brands Recommend
The executives highlighted several key business challenges that Eagle Eye’s platform addresses for their organisations.
Bronwyn Barbarel said Z Energy needed a configurable platform that could adapt to their needs without requiring constant coding.
“It’s been really interesting for us. We needed to look for a platform that could work with us in a configurable way rather than something that we had to code ourselves everytime. What’s been awesome is we’ve put it through its paces to see how far it could stretch [and] how deep it could go before we chose it,” she said.
“What it allows us to do is get an offer in front of our customers at the right time with the right offer. We’re really at the beginning of it all and I can’t wait to really put it through its paces.”
Brendan Woodward said the platform excelled at managing points programmes and transaction processing.
“It’s fantastic if you want to run a points program. It will ingest all of your transactions and it will ensure that the right customers receive their points, provide a full audit log, and you can set up any type of points offer that you want to, plus a whole bunch of other types of offer mechanics that aren’t necessarily points offers,” he said.
Andrew Stewart said Eagle Eye was essential infrastructure for Ampol’s loyalty operations.
“Eagle Eye is the glue that is holding our loyalty technology in place. It’s slotted into our technology ecosystem, it’s our offer orchestration engine, it’s the key to delivering what our customers are wanting,” he said.
Janelle Gostelow said the platform provided consistency in complex loyalty environments.
“For our business when I was working at Viva, they were very important to us in terms of providing consistent loyalty adjudication for our customers in what was a very complex loyalty ecosystem that had lots of rules [and] lots of products,” she said.
Standout Results from AI Deployment
The executives also shared some of the standout results and benefits of their experiences working with Eagle Eye’s performance.
Bronwyn Barbarel said speed to market was crucial for Z Energy’s transition away from the Flybuys programme.
“For us the speed to market is the big thing. We had a burning platform, we’d chosen to go for our own program rather than third-party loyalty, we had our trusted partner in New Zealand that we wanted to continue with so we needed to know that we could integrate really well with that. But we knew that [our previous provider] Flybuys was closing,” she said.
“We needed to get into market quickly and we worked with Eagle Eye to understand how they would integrate with our existing platform; [which included] Salesforce for our data side of things, our existing platform that Invenco does for our outdoor payment terminals, and TQ for POS (point of sale).”
“That allowed us to get that speed to market by bringing in Eagle Eye to work purely in the orchestration stuff for us,” she said.
Brendan Woodward, whose organisation is still in the implementation phase, praised the collaborative experience.
“We are in the implementation stage, so we’re going to launch our program next year … but working with their team on the implementation itself (a lot of implementations on different platforms), it’s been quite a good experience working with Eagle Eye and their team,” he said.
Andrew Stewart said Ampol was exceeding all its loyalty programme metrics thanks to the platform’s real-time capabilities.
“We are hitting every single metric that we set out as what we wanted to get out of a brand new loyalty program. We’re smashing those metrics. Eagle Eye gives us a real-time solution,” he said.
“Our customers are standing in front of our site staff and we’re serving them immediately and Eagle Eye is allowing that to happen.”
AI-First Solutions the Future of Loyalty
When asked why they would recommend Eagle Eye over other solutions, the executives cited factors including proven scale, flexibility, and ease of deployment.
Bronwyn Barbarel said the company’s track record with major retailers was a key deciding factor.
“We looked at the market, we looked at our existing provider for loyalty, [and] we looked at other providers we already had that might’ve been able to stretch into loyalty. For us it was finding someone who had credentials in loyalty and were doing things at a large scale,” she said.
“We’d seen what was happening from a Tesco and Woolworths point of view, we could see the number of transactions that could happen and go through. We chose it because we knew that anything we were thinking about in the future that we had plans of, we knew they had already done previously.”
Barbarel also praised the support her team received.
“That really made the difference for us. Then, how the pricing worked, how the team would come and help us build. We’ve had amazing people come and work with us. Coming to New Zealand to help us build, that’s been all-in and really awesome,” she said.
Brendan Woodward highlighted the platform’s flexibility in handling diverse offer types and membership structures.
“Flexible. I threw hundreds of different offer types at them and they were able to handle them all, I also like the flexibility in the way that you can set up the membership constructs. We are looking to have a family or household membership construct but also an individual membership construct that sits underneath that. Eagle Eye was able to facilitate that as well,” he said.
Andrew Stewart praised the platform’s maturity and ease of implementation.
“They’ve got a great name globally [and] a very mature product. The real key thing was every single requirement we put in front of them, they tick the box without having to do code changes. It all clicks, really easy to work with,” he said.
Janelle Gostelow emphasised the deployment advantages of Eagle Eye’s architecture.
“I think it’s the ease of deploying Eagle Eye. Because it is a loyalty specialty system, and it’s a headless design system; you can interface it quite easily with all your other systems, and it’s really very good at doing that quickly,” she said.
“They’ve got an AI-first methodology in how they do those deployments.”
