Key Takeaways From The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Services, Q4 2026

A rapidly evolving technology landscape changes how consumers discover brands, evaluate choices, and make decisions. This shift exposes a weakness in many loyalty strategies that rely on points and discounts alone to sustain customer relationships.

Traditional loyalty programs still have a role, but brands weaken program impact when they treat loyalty as a series of campaigns or a platform only designed to drive attention and traffic. Loyalty delivers greater value when it becomes an enterprise capability spanning the customer journey. Leading loyalty services providers understand this and are helping brands make that transition.

Our new report, The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Services, Q4 2026, evaluates seven loyalty services providers across 22 criteria. The research reveals three important takeaways:

  • Expand the loyalty mandate. A points-based program designed to drive transactions can be an effective strategy, but without a focus on driving emotional connections to the brand, it will struggle to drive long-term customer relationships. The loyalty service providers we evaluated in this research spend a significant amount of time helping brands elevate the customer experience and offer members differentiated value across the broader customer journey. This approach turns loyalty into an enterprisewide capability focused on stronger customer relationships and business outcomes.
  • Demand practical value from AI. All of the providers in this evaluation have well defined AI-enabled services to help brands increase speed to value. And in most cases, all the providers in this research are well ahead of the clients they serve with respect to AI capabilities. Providers are applying AI to decisioning, workflows, data intelligence, and customer engagement. The strongest approaches apply AI across strategy and execution while maintaining disciplined oversight. Loyalty leaders should scrutinize whether those capabilities produce more relevant experiences and measurable outcomes. As AI-infused capabilities expand, it’s critical that providers demonstrate a commensurate focus on trust, accountability, security and transparency.
  • Choose for the future state, not the immediate need. The evaluation reveals meaningful trade-offs among specialist expertise, global scale, data assets, CX design, business-case development, and program operations. Leaders should weight the 22 criteria around their own transformation priorities and use the Wave as a starting point rather than a universal ranking. Select a partner based on the transformation your organization intends to achieve, then tailor the Wave criteria to that goal.

Read The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Services, Q4 2026 to explore the full evaluation and detailed provider analysis. To discuss how these findings apply to your loyalty strategy, request a guidance session with me.

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