The most valuable loyalty program isn’t a points card—it’s a living system that knows each shopper, adapts in real time, and proves it can drive incremental spend. We sit down with Jeff Baskin, Chief Revenue Officer at Eagle Eye, to unpack how unified commerce and true one-to-one personalization are reshaping grocery, convenience, and hospitality. Instead of stitching tools together, Jeff explains how a single platform that connects payments, promotions, loyalty, and engagement unlocks a complete customer view and makes every interaction feel relevant across channels.

Jeff pulls back the curtain on two standout case studies. Giant Eagle combined loyalty with digital promotions to generate hundreds of millions in incremental sales by influencing the next purchase, not just rewarding the last. Tesco’s AI challenges push personalization further: models weigh 190+ decisions per shopper to assign tailored goals and rewards, scaling from 3 million to 10 million customers quickly while guaranteeing measurable uplift. These programs win CPG support because they tie spend to clear ROI, not vague impressions, and they help retailers grow margin by moving shoppers into higher-value behaviors.

We also get practical about the messy middle: data silos, legacy POS programs, and organizational friction. Jeff shares why a consultative approach matters—start with customer outcomes, treat data as a strategic asset, and build a feedback loop that improves with every transaction. We compare Walmart’s tech-driven experience gains with the edge regional grocers can reclaim by pairing human connection with AI-powered relevance. The takeaway is simple: personalization works because it mirrors how people already consume content on Netflix and Instagram. When retailers deliver that level of relevance across store and digital, loyalty stops being a cost and becomes a growth engine.

Subscribe, share with a colleague who cares about loyalty, and tell us: where are your silos, and what would you test first?

Fraud doesn’t just show up as a stolen card anymore—it arrives as coordinated global operations and as “friendly” misuse from customers who otherwise look perfect on paper. We sit down with Arman Najarian, CMO at Sift, to unpack how merchants can block the bad without breaking the checkout flow for everyone else. From account takeovers and identity theft to policy abuse and return gaming, Armin explains why risk isn’t a back‑office metric but a core part of customer experience, where a single false positive can cost a loyal buyer and a long relationship.

We dig into how Sift evaluates identity in real time, returning a risk score in about 200 ms, and why context across a network of merchants beats one‑off signals. It takes a network to fight a network, and that shared view turns fragmented behavior into reliable trust decisions. The conversation moves to agentic commerce—AI agents that can discover, sign up, and transact on our behalf. Convenience is huge, but so are questions: how do we authenticate agents, delegate consent, assign liability, and keep fraudsters from hiding behind machine identities? With card networks, banks, processors, and solution providers racing toward standards, the stakes rise as forecasts point to a leap from billions today to over a trillion dollars in agent‑driven transactions by 2030.

We also explore why Gen Z gets phished more despite digital fluency, the practical limits of self‑sovereign identity in the private sector, and the growing dual threat: organized crime scaling up and first‑party misuse spreading inside customer bases. If you care about conversion, approval rates, and loyalty as much as chargebacks, this is a roadmap for making trust invisible when it should be, and unmistakable when it must be. If this conversation helped you see risk differently, follow, share with a colleague, and leave a quick review so more people can find the show.

If you’ve felt the creep of “good enough” in your marketing, you’re not imagining it. We dig into why plausible outputs are everywhere, how AI accelerates the trend, and what it takes to compete on strategic value when leaders only lean in for metrics tied to money. With Andrew Schulkind of Andigo, we get candid about the gap between process metrics and business metrics, the lure of “ornamentrics,” and the practical steps that reconnect campaigns to revenue, profitability, and customer outcomes.

We start where most frameworks gloss over: defining audience segments through real conversations. Not just with sales and success, but with product teams, long-term customers, and the ones who churned. Those insights expose the pains people actually feel and the outcomes they will pay to achieve. From there, we show how to use both fear and aspiration responsibly: articulate the problem that causes daytime heartburn, paint the future state buyers want, and keep your message grounded in what they value rather than what you want to sell.

Then we turn strategy into motion. You’ll hear a simple nurture cadence built around three core pains and three matching outcomes, each email carrying proof, a useful resource, and a micro-CTA that reveals intent. Track those signals, learn which messages trigger movement, and tie engagement to pipeline and revenue instead of vanity stats. We also talk frankly about when to step on implementation to protect strategic value and how to leverage AI without losing customer proximity.

If you’re ready to trade shiny metrics for meaningful results, this conversation gives you a clear path forward and tools you can use this week. Enjoy the episode, share it with a teammate who’s buried in dashboards, and if it helps you reframe your plan, subscribe and leave a review so others can find it too.