An average customer is a sceptic, and that should not be surprising because people are constrained to be careful. They have been lied to by almost everyone―government, politicians, service providers, marketers, manufacturers, etc. They are constantly bombarded by companies trying to grab their money and when they contact a company with an issue, they often have to battle to get the company to make it right.
Even companies that claim to be customer-obsessed usually think of customer obsession only in terms of how it can maximize Return On Investment (ROI) and increase the bottom line. It is more of an obsession with the customers’ wallets than the customers themselves.
The problem with customer satisfaction
To maximize their share of customers’ wallets, most brands spend large—if not the largest—portion of their data collection budget on monitoring customer satisfaction. They attempt to use these measures to outpace their competition and get their customers to spend more. They rarely care about making the customer experience the best it can be. Instead, they only concern themselves with being a bit better than the competition, so that the customer is more likely to spend money at the ‘better’ experience.
And, this is where the problem of customer satisfaction metrics lies. This is a relative measure; it does not reflect how well a company is creating the experience a customer really wants. Customer satisfaction measures what researchers call ‘The Expectancy-Disconfirmation Paradigm (EDP)’. Customer satisfaction is an evaluation of how well something performs relative to how the customer thinks it will perform. This is why focusing on customer satisfaction can be dangerous. Satisfaction is only relative to past experiences with your business and similar companies—who are also likely only doing an objectively average job at it.
Customers and companies are usually in broken relationships
This desire to treat customers as an object whose resources are to be maximally mined has also led most companies to spend more time and resources in acquiring new customers instead of taking care of existing customers.
Read Also: Relationship Marketing: Key to Brand Loyalty
Just look at the number of companies offering great incentives to new customers but offering little or no appreciation to customers that have been with them for years, and it becomes obvious how little effort is put into maintaining relationships. Customers end up being treated like numbers instead of people.
This is no different from what erodes personal relationships. The main reasons relationships go south are selfishness, narcissism, a lack of balance, the relationship not being a priority, and issues of trust. When customer relationships are treated as one-sided—when there isn’t an effort to try and benefit the customer at least as much as the company benefits from the customer—there’s no reason for customers to view a company with anything but scepticism and a lack of trust. You can’t build loyalty without trust. Yet, many companies start to try and build ‘loyalty programmes’ without fixing the broken relationships and building trust.
The problem with loyalty programmes
Most loyalty programmes aren’t truly about loyalty. They’re based on an outdated idea of loyalty that focuses solely on behavioural loyalty. Currently, loyalty research has gone beyond thinking of loyalty in this one-dimensional way and instead conceives of loyalty as encompassing attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioural dimensions.4
In other words, loyalty isn’t just how people behave towards a brand, it’s also about how they think and feel about it.
A customer can be loyal from a perspective of behaviour because they currently see no other option—the same reason they may say they’re satisfied—but are quick to switch if someone meets their deeper human needs better. Instead of trying to build great relationships by understanding what motivates customers to do business with them at a deep, human level and then doing more and more of that to build trust and ultimately create loyalty, most companies skip these attitudinal and cognitive dimensions of loyalty and focus solely on programmes to encourage behaviour.
Companies reward their customers in the same monetary and monotonous ways, instead of doing what they should be doing: rewarding the best customers in ways that reflect why they love the brand in the first place. But, that requires deeply listening to customers. And, when companies act like narcissists for their own benefits, it becomes hard to listen. These companies are essentially trying to trap their customers in bad relationships.
Finding true loyalty
Loyalty begins with trust and trust doesn’t happen overnight.
Trust is built up over time by customers seeing that you have their best interests in mind over and over again. They don’t mind that you have your own interests—just like in any relationship—but they want to see that you care about them in an equal way.
Loyalty happens when they develop cognitive and emotional attachments to a business as a result of trust being built up over time. These cognitive and emotional attachments reinforce their behaviours and get them to both think of you first and purchase from you frequently.
Last line: Loyalty requires being proactive instead of reactive. It’s not about being slightly better than the competition or waiting until enough customers complain before you fix it. It is about understanding your customers’ tensions and desires better than they do and constantly trying to push further towards those ideals. These start with deeply listening to and understanding your customers and caring about their needs as much as you do your own.
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