How To Turn Skeptical People Into Loyal Customers
Aaron Shields
Brand Strategist | Customized brand strategy systems that transform your business into the preferred choice for high-value customers | Founder @ Make Business Matter | 20 years helping startups to $19B brands
People are skeptical.
And it shouldn’t be surprising. After all, they’ve been lied to by politicians and corporations. They’ve seen their data stolen. They’re constantly bombarded with companies trying to grab every dollar they can. And when they contact a company with an issue, they often have to battle to get the company to make it right.
Even companies claiming to be customer-obsessed usually think of customer-obsession only in terms of maximizing ROI and increasing the bottom line.
Companies are more obsessed with the customers’ wallets than the customers themselves.
The Problem With Customer Satisfaction
To maximize their share of customers’ wallets, most corporations spend a large — if not the largest — portion of their data collection budget on monitoring customer satisfaction.1
Companies use these measures to outpace their competition and get their customers to spend more.
But 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 on the “better” experience.
Several years ago, I ordered an iPhone to pick up at a nearby AT&T store. The employee at the store was more interested in making the next sale than in giving me the correct information to set up the new phone.
His error created a SIM error that Apple had never seen before and took over four hours on the phone with AT&T and Apple to resolve.
Most people would consider this a poor experience. It was. But, if I were to answer a satisfaction survey, I would probably answer that I was “somewhat satisfied” with the overall experience: The people on the phone tried their best and eventually resolved the situation. And, given the horror stories I hear from friends about every major mobile service provider, the experience at another mobile provider would have been about the same at some point in the future.
Being “somewhat satisfied” with this debacle highlights the main problem with customer satisfaction metrics: they’re relative measures. They don’t reflect how well a company creates the experience a customer actually wants.
Customer satisfaction measures what researchers call The Expectancy-Disconfirmation Paradigm (EDP). Customer satisfaction evaluates how well something performs relative to how the customer thinks it will perform.
Even though my experience with AT&T was objectively poor, AT&T performed as expected and how I perceived other mobile companies would also perform. As a result, I was “somewhat satisfied.”
But if some other company wowed me with a much better experience, you can be sure I’d be switching at the end of my current contract.
The comparative nature of customer satisfaction makes focusing on satisfaction dangerous since the comparison is likely with other companies who are only doing an objectively average job.
Ultimately, the customers have a passive, unspoken desire to leave.
It’s why disruptive technologies are so … disruptive. They offer customers a significantly better option that comes closer to meeting a customer’s ideal experience than a company whose experience comes from only striving to be moderately better than the also average competition.
Many customers are likely “satisfied” with your products and services. But how many would truly care if you disappeared from the market?
Customers and Companies Are in Broken Relationships
The desire to treat customers as objects with resources to mine to the greatest extent possible has also led most companies to spend more time and resources on acquiring new customers instead of taking care of existing customers.
Just look at the number of companies offering great incentives to new customers but offering no appreciation to customers who have been with them for years — beyond upselling them with some weak “deal” for being a “valued customer.” It quickly becomes obvious how little effort companies put into maintaining relationships.
Companies end up treating customers like numbers instead of people.
Customers are numbers; consumers are statistics.? —Stanley Marcus, Quest for the Best
This treatment is no different than 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.2
When there isn’t an effort to benefit the customer at least as much as the company benefits from the customer, the relationship becomes one-sided. And when the relationship is one-sided, there’s no reason for customers to view a company with anything but skepticism and a lack of trust.
You can’t build loyalty without trust.
Yet, many companies try to build “loyalty programs” without fixing the broken relationships and building trust.
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The Problem With Loyalty Programs
Most loyalty programs aren’t really about loyalty.
These programs reflect an outdated idea of loyalty that focuses solely on behavioral 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 behavioral dimensions.3
In other words, loyalty isn’t just how people behave towards a brand but also how they think and feel about it.
A person can be loyal from a behavioral perspective because they currently see no other option but are ripe to switch if someone meets their human needs better.
It’s the same situation that happens when customers say they’re “satisfied.”
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 programs to encourage behavior.
The “loyalty” to these programs comes from what researchers term switching costs. Switching costs are the perceived costs — monetary, psychological, and time-based — it would take to switch over and start with a new program.
Switching costs make it hard to switch from one loyalty program to another.
Companies focus on these switching costs because they know their “loyalty” programs lack a distinct advantage. Their programs look similar to their competitors’ programs. They 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 benefit, it becomes hard to listen.
These companies are essentially trying to trap their customers in bad relationships.
It’s not surprising that so many of them end up with lackluster results from their loyalty programs.
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.
Customers don’t mind that you have your own interests — just like in any relationship. But they want to see that you care about them equally.
Loyalty happens when customers develop cognitive and emotional attachments to a business due to trust accumulated over time. And these cognitive and emotional attachments reinforce their behaviors and get them to both think of you first and purchase from you frequently.
Trust 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’s about understanding your customers’ tensions and desires better than they do and then constantly trying to solve their tensions and fulfill their desires in better and better ways.
Trust starts with deeply listening to and understanding your customers and caring about their needs as much as you do your own.
And trust is how you turn skeptical customers into loyal ones.
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References
This article originally appeared on Medium.