The Loyalty Capacity Problem
- Wickersham Team
- 20 hours ago
- 6 min read
Wanting a Benefit and Being Able to Use It Are Different Things
Most benefit designs start by asking if the benefit is desirable. But research shows this is not the best first question. A more important question is whether customers, employees, or patients can actually use the benefit in their real lives.
Organizational generosity is more common than it seems. For example, an employer offers unlimited paid time off but notices few employees use it. A retailer creates a generous loyalty program, but only a certain group of customers engage while others do not. A healthcare system launches a digital portal to save patients time, but those who need it most are the least likely to use it.
In each of these cases, the organization created a benefit that looks good on paper. The benefit is real, the intention is sincere, and the offer is open to everyone—still, many of the people it was meant to help never actually receive it.
This is the loyalty capacity problem. The issue is not desire—customers, employees, or patients often want the benefit. The real problem is reach: not everyone has the conditions needed to take advantage of the benefit.
What the Research Found
A study published in the European Journal of Marketing in August 2026 looked at loyalty program behavior among Australian supermarket customers, including a second study with 820 participants. The researchers sought to understand what actually drives engagement in loyalty programs, and their findings deserve more attention.
Loyalty program engagement is more than whether customers see value, trust the retailer, or feel committed. It also depends on whether they can participate as the program requires. Capacity—meaning both the tendency and the practical ability to use the program—was found to be a key, separate factor in engagement.
This finding matters beyond loyalty programs and supermarkets. If capacity is a separate driver of engagement, then benefits designed without considering recipients' capacity will often fail for those who need them most. Ironically, those with the least capacity are often the ones the benefit was meant to help.
Loyalty programs are a good example because their capacity requirements are easy to see and measure. Some rewards require waiting for promotions, buying in advance, or quickly tracking and switching options. Others need digital skills to track points or redeem benefits online. A customer may want the reward but lack the time, money, or digital tools to get it. The urge exists, but the capacity does not.
A benefit is not valuable just because people want it. It only creates value when people can actually access it. These are two separate design challenges, but most organizations only address one.
The Access Gap
The Access Gap is the difference between wanting a benefit and being able to get it. It is the gap between what a benefit promises and what someone can actually receive, based on their real-life situation.
Many types of constraints can create this gap. Time is the most common. For example, a benefit that requires action at a particular time or during a short window may not work for a busy parent, no matter how much they want it. Money can also be a barrier. If a benefit requires upfront spending, it excludes people with less financial leeway, who often need it most. Information is another barrier. Benefits that require people to know about, track, and manage them reward those who are attentive and leave out those who are overwhelmed. Behavioral flexibility matters too. If a benefit requires quick changes to routines, it is harder for people with caregiving duties, multiple jobs, or limited transportation.
The Access Gap is often invisible to the people inside the organization who designed the benefit. Designers of rewards programs, employee benefits, or patient tools usually have the time, digital skills, money, and information needed to use these benefits themselves. Their sense of accessibility is based on their own experience, which can differ greatly from that of the people they are designing for.
Where the Gap Appears in Practice
The loyalty program exemplifies a pattern that recurs across industries and settings.
Unlimited PTO
This is a common example of a benefit that looks good on paper but fails in practice. In high-performance cultures, employees may be offered unlimited leave yet feel they cannot take it. The real barrier is not time but the social and professional risk of using the benefit. Here, the Access Gap is cultural rather than structural, making it harder to spot and more costly to fix.
Tuition reimbursement
Tuition reimbursement is typically structured so employees pay for education upfront and are reimbursed later. This works for employees with savings but not for those without. The gap is financial. Those least able to pay upfront are often the ones who would benefit most.
Digital healthcare portals
Digital healthcare portals are designed to give patients faster access to test results, appointments, and communication with providers. These time savings are real for patients with reliable internet access, smartphones, and digital skills. But for older patients, those who share devices, or those with limited English proficiency, the portal can make things harder rather than easier. The people who would benefit most from easier access to healthcare are often the least able to use the available digital tools.
Promotional loyalty discounts
These programs reward customers who can time their purchases around promotions, buy in bulk, or switch products based on weekly deals. This setup benefits people with limited storage space, limited transportation options, and flexible buying habits. It gives much less value to customers who buy only what they need when they need it, since they cannot take advantage of the timing and stockpiling the program favors.
Points-based corporate rewards programs
In these programs, employees earn points by participating in activities, receiving recognition, or using online platforms. This setup rewards those with time, comfort with digital tools, and knowledge of the program. It often excludes frontline employees who have little free time during their shifts and limited access to corporate systems.
The Access Gap is usually hidden from the people inside the organization who created it. Designers can benefit from it themselves, but the people they designed for may not.
The Measurement Problem
Most benefit designs check whether people want the benefit during planning, then measure how much they use it after launch. But neither approach reveals the Access Gap, because neither asks who is not using the benefit or why.
Utilization data shows what is being used but not who cannot use it or why. A loyalty program might have high overall engagement yet still be out of reach for certain customer groups. This pattern only becomes clear when data is broken down by customer type, and non-users are studied as closely as users.
Desirability research typically asks customers whether they value a benefit, measuring desire rather than capacity. For example, a customer might say, "Yes, I want that reward," but cannot obtain it because the timing does not work or the upfront cost is too high. In survey data, this person appears the same as someone who wants the reward and can get it. The overall desirability score looks good, but the Access Gap remains hidden.
To close the gap, organizations need a new way to measure. They should ask not only whether people value the benefit but also whether they have what they need to access it. This means understanding the time, money, information, flexibility, and digital skills the benefit requires, and comparing these needs with the actual circumstances of the people for whom the benefit is intended.
Designing for Reach, Not Only Desirability
The main takeaway from capacity research is not to make benefits less generous, but to design them so the intended people can actually use them.
For employers designing leave policies, this means looking at what the company culture says about taking leave, not just what the policy document states. A generous leave policy is useless if the culture punishes employees for using it, especially for those who need reassurance that taking leave is okay.
For retailers designing loyalty programs, this means checking whether the rewards mostly go to customers who can time purchases, buy in bulk, or track promotions online. If so, the program rewards those with the greatest capacity, not those who would benefit most from it.
For healthcare organizations designing patient portals, this means testing how well the portal works for the actual patient groups they serve, not just for the average tech-savvy user. A portal that works for most adults may not work for the patients who need easier access to care the most.
In every case, the key design question is: given the real situations of the people this benefit is for, what does it take to access it, and do those people actually have those circumstances?
Wanting something and being able to get it are not the same. Many benefits are structured in ways that ultimately provide less value to those who need them most, even though overall metrics make them appear generous.
Capacity research in loyalty programs highlights a bigger problem: organizations often measure whether a benefit is desired, but not whether it is actually attainable. These are two separate questions, yet most organizations ask only one.
The Access Gap is the gap between wanting to use a benefit and being able to use it. It is better to measure this gap before launching a benefit than to wait for usage data to reveal problems that could have been predicted.
Some ideas are worth discussing in the context of your organization.
