We Create Customer Disloyalty
We talk a lot about customer loyalty. We agonize over winning customers and hoping they’re happy enough to stay. We look at retention rates and other metrics that tell us if customers return or grow with us.
We typically call this “loyalty”: customers staying faithful to our company. When customers don’t stay, we consider them “disloyal.” When they leave, cancel, don’t renew, or stop buying from us, we say they’re not loyal.
Reframe this, especially in internal meetings and conversations.
We can certainly speak of low customer loyalty, but the implication tends to be that we’re pretty great. We didn’t do anything wrong. These wacky, fickle, annoying customers are just disloyal.
If we phrase it like this, we can pretend there wasn’t much we could do about it. These people just aren’t loyal.
You might hear that “customer disloyalty is the new norm,” and you should just get used to this. But it’s another excuse for us to continue delivering low quality while acting like customers are randomly and arbitrarily disloyal.
Happy customers generally don’t leave.
No customer or user wakes up in the morning and says, “I’m pretty happy with Company X, but why be loyal to them?! I’ll take the time to find another vendor or shop, and move all of my business to another company!”
Finding a different vendor or shop is often painful, frustrating, and annoying. Most customers would rather stay with us than have to search for a replacement. But we may have pushed them away, and made the horror of staying worse than the pain of leaving.
We caused this.
We must start seeing low loyalty or low retention rates as things our company actively or passively does. We alienated these people. We drove them away. Our actions or inactions made them not want to stay.
The disloyalty is our own.
We broke our promises to people who expected more and better from us. They expected quality and value. They expected positive experiences, and we let them down. Maybe one bad experience was enough for them to leave. They may have suffered through a lot of our poor quality and failures before they finally walked away.
Don’t think of someone as a disloyal customer.
Place the action and blame where it needs to be, which is on us. We made these people not want to stay. We made these people want to buy elsewhere or not renew their contract.
Do and Be Better
Do we know all of the why and how behind how we alienate customers and users? Do we understand what we have done — or failed to do — that made them want to walk away from us? If not, it’s time for some deep generative research. We should understand the root causes before trying to come up with solutions.
And if we have found the truth, maybe even the painful truth, what actions have we taken? We want to raise our NPS or customer satisfaction score. We want to see more customers stay, and we want them to tell friends and colleagues that we’re great. But what is our strategy to get there?
Start by examining how we are disloyal to the important people in our ecosystem.
- Our broken promises.
- We don’t follow through on obligations.
- We deliver low quality and value, probably lower quality than our website and Salespeople promised.
- We ignore complaints, even when they are about things we know are broken in our products and services.
- We assume we’re good enough even when our failures and metrics show that customers know we suck.
Customers aren’t disloyal in a vacuum or randomly.
We made them leave or want to leave. Fresh and better strategies and actions must put customers and their experiences at the center.
Improve your demonstration of loyalty to your customers and users. They may respond in kind.
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Connect with us or learn more:
- CustomerCentricity.com — our website
- youtube.com/@cx-cc — YouTube channel
- patreon.com/cxcc — online community and free mailing list
- cxcc.to/ckys — “Customers Know You Suck,” my recent book on improving customer adoption, satisfaction, and retention
