Nine reasons why better products may not bring customers back
Image courtesy of Thought Catalog on Unsplash
How long does it take to change a bad experience? If all works well, good products and services should deliver good customer experience. Of course, the essence of a really good product or service is a low failure rate and a high recovery rate. When products are deemed reliable, they are more likely to engender loyalty. Likewise, when the recovery rate is high, it denotes that problems are corrected quickly.
Notwithstanding, there are times when things go wrong and neither the unusualness of product error nor the speed of recovery will be good enough to placate the customer. On such occasions, customers will vote with their feet and may not return. This blog serves as a lesson to producers and suppliers that whilst getting it right is difficult getting it wrong can be disastrous. Set out below are nine reasons why better products may not bring customers back.
1. The challenge of personalised and collective experience
Customer experience is both personal and social. Let’s use a big screen motion picture as a case in point. When a movie is screened at the theatre, movie-goers view the picture by themselves and in the company of other movie-goers. As a group, most movie-goers may be satisfied with the show. However, a small group may be dissatisfied and feel that their money has been wasted. This may be complicated further by the fact that each customer is dissatisfied with something different. In such a situation, even if they knew, it would be impossible for the movie studio to produce a sequel incorporating product improvements to satisfy everyone.
2. Cultivated customer appetite
Over time and perhaps without even realising it, manufacturers and suppliers cultivate customer appetite in such a way, that the supplier is no longer able to satisfy it. A different way to describe it is to say that the customer is not so much dissatisfied with what the product or service is, they are dissatisfied with what it is not. Therefore, even the provision of a better product or service, may not necessarily improve the customer experience. In other words, they may not know what they do want, but they do know what they don’t want. In such a situation, a supplier may find their customers lured away by a product standard that they could never have anticipated.
3. Psychology of ‘experience association’
The psychology of ‘experience association’ is a powerful part of the customer journey. Consider this arrangement of words for a moment: did the customer experience something negative whilst they were doing something positive, or did they experience something negative because they were doing something positive? This mental mapping of experience will have a direct impact on the manner of the customer response. If they perceive their experience through the lens of the former, then they are more likely to see product failure as a bug not a feature. However, if it is the latter, then they are more likely to perceive product failure as a feature not a bug.
4. On the spectrum of dissatisfaction, they are less dissatisfied
Dissatisfaction has a certain psychology to it. If a customer has been dissatisfied with a product or service for a lengthy period, that negative experience is likely to have been increasingly negative over that time. That which began as irritation morphs into disappointment and eventually frustration. Therefore, any improvement, whilst welcome, may only serve to make them less dissatisfied with something that are already dissatisfied with. Suppliers need to think of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction on a spectrum such as the Likert scale, not as a binary choice.
5. The light customer footprint
The light customer footprint has to do with the level of a customer’s engagement with and commitment to a product or service. Where customers have a light footprint, it is because they have no real loyalty towards the product or service to begin with. They are more likely to be a tangential or short-term product or service user and even to the extent that they have used the product or service for a prolonged period, there is no dependency. Therefore, if they are already dissatisfied with the product or service, any improvement in quality is unlikely to affect their view one way or another.
6. The power of recency bias
With recency bias, the customer views the product or service through the lens of their most recent experience of it. The recency principle is entirely subjective and as part of this, the customer will generally ignore information from which to draw an objective or balanced conclusion. Therefore, if the customer perceives their most recent interaction with a product or service to have been negative or not satisfactory, then the product of service will overall be judged as dissatisfactory. If indeed that proves to be the case, it is hard to imagine how improvements to a product will be enough to convince a customer that has already made up their mind.
7. The book-end perspective
In the context of this summary, bookends are reference points of customer experience. The first bookend is when the customer was most satisfied with the product or service and the second is when they were least satisfied. In between will be all the other experiences, both positive and negative. However, it is from this aggregate that the customer will reach a balanced view of the product of service. If the conclusion from the aggregate view is negative, it is not unreasonable to assume that, even with improvements, the customer may not necessarily re-engage with products or services that they have already dis-engaged from.
8. Choice based dissatisfaction
Do you remember the BlackBerry? As hard as it is to imagine, the once wildly popular BlackBerry rivalled Apple for smart phone sales supremacy between 2008 and 2010. In the early stages of the rivalry, BlackBerry even had a market edge over its now vaunted rival. Unfortunately for BlackBerry, the end when it came was swift. Despite improvements and multiple product relaunches, sales slowly declined and in January 2022 production of the once iconic brand ceased. This is a good example of how customer dissatisfaction is not always caused by the performance of the product but can instead, be triggered by the quality of alternatives.
9. When the remedy is just as bad as the error
There are times when the ability to correct an error is neither possible nor desirable. Under normal circumstances, if a customer has had a negative experience, how that customer experiences what the supplier does next, will usually dictate whether that customer returns or is lost forever. Notwithstanding, there are times when even ameliorative steps, no matter how generous, may not be sufficient to assuage negative customer perception. If I go to my favourite restaurant and find a fly in my soup, the compensatory offer of a free two course meal, prepared in unhygienic kitchen, is probably the last thing I want.
Customer retention is one of the biggest challenges that any business faces. However, as this blog sets out, it is an aspect of market dynamics that suppliers have least control over. This is because a customer’s relationship with products and services that they use is often a highly complex mix of emotions, values, geography, demography and attention span. Even where customers do express satisfaction with a product, there is no guarantee that will be enough to retain their patronage. The arrival of a competitor offering a little bit more or a little bit different, may completely change customer perception. The ability to exert influence over customer behaviour diminishes even further when products fail.
