Lead Data Analyst; Loyalty

Position: Lead Data Analyst (Loyalty)
Collinson is the global leader in travel experiences and customer engagement, a business that builds loyalty 500 million times a day, across 140 countries, for some of the world's most ambitious brands. Our clients include major financial institutions, airlines, transport operators and retailers who trust us to design programmes that move customers from passive participation to genuine, measurable commitment.

Our loyalty practice sits at the intersection of behavioural strategy, data science and programme design. We believe that the best loyalty programmes are strategic assets - not cost centres - and we've built our methodology around the evidence: that incrementality, not points balances, is the true measure of a programme's worth.

Recent mandates include the design and delivery of large-scale loyalty and customer engagement programmes across the transport, mobility and travel sectors. These are complex, high-stakes initiatives involving multiple stakeholders, significant commercial value and innovative customer propositions. They represent exactly the kind of work this role will be asked to support and lead.

Purpose of the jobYou will own the measurement and insight function for a flagship loyalty programme. This is the role that determines how the programme’s success is proved: what gets measured, how genuine behaviour change is separated from activity that would have happened anyway, and whether a result is robust enough to act on. The business case rests on incrementality, so the credibility of that evidence is a single point of accountability, and it is yours.

You will set the measurement approach, own the analytics roadmap and its prioritisation, and be the senior data voice in a governance structure spanning the client’s architects, a global platform vendor, a design team and multiple delivery partners. Metric definitions, measurement design and analytical method are decided by this role and are not changed without its agreement. Matters affecting programme scope, cost or client commitment are escalated to the VP, Loyalty Consulting.

This is a senior specialist role without line-management responsibility. Leadership is exercised through standard-setting, quality assurance, method ownership and mentoring. It suits someone who has owned an analytical function before, who is comfortable being the person who says a number is not yet good enough to act on, and who can hold that position with senior stakeholders who would prefer a different answer.

Key Responsibilities Owning the measurement function
• Own the measurement framework end to end: what is measured, how each metric is defined, how a result is proved, and what the organisation is entitled to claim from it
• Design and own the control-group, holdout and incrementality approach that separates genuine behaviour change from background activity
• Set the canonical metric definitions every party works to, and hold them stable as the single source of truth
• Own the analytics and insight roadmap: what gets built, in what order, and what is deliberately not built
• Set the analytical standards, tooling and ways of working used across the Loyalty practice, and represent the discipline in practice-level capability planning

Accountability and outcomes
• Accountable for the evidence the programme uses to prove its value, and for that evidence surviving challenge up to client board level
• Accountable for delivering the benefit-realisation position at each programme gate, on the gate date, to the standard the client’s assurance process requires
• Accountable for the commercial value attributed to the measurement function, and for reporting honestly where performance falls short of forecast

Measurement roadmap and sequencing
• Prioritise the analytics backlog against programme milestones, the release train and the governance calendar, and defend those choices when they are challenged
• Sequence measurement design so instrumentation is specified ahead of build rather than retrofitted after launch
• Balance long-run capability building against immediate demand, and make the trade-off explicit rather than absorbing it Analytical risk and judgement
• Judge when…