Breaking the Loyalty Loop | Customers, Etc.
Be careful to avoid triggering a break in your customer's loyalty.
On Tuesday of this week, I opened the Lyft app on my phone and requested a ride to the airport. After arriving in Dallas, I again requested a Lyft to get from the airport to Saltbox. On Wednesday morning, I grabbed another Lyft from the hotel to Saltbox, and finally that evening—right this moment, actually—I got a Lyft to get from the airport to my home in Atlanta. When I fly to Seattle next week, I’ll probably use Lyft to get around.
What may be obvious from my story above is that I’m demonstrating loyalty to Lyft. What I haven’t yet told you is why.
On Wednesday of last week, I was returning home from my first business trip in over two years. I had taken Uber every time I needed to hail a ride. I didn’t have any particular emotional attachment to Uber or anything, but I had taken the time to set up my business profile in the Uber app, so that’s what I went with. It was fine.
My experience changed during my ride home that evening. The trunk of the car was completely full, the car smelled terrible, and the driver kept his phone in his hand the whole time, forcing him to take his eyes off the road to look down and check the map. I was eager to not repeat that experience and was happy to go through the small trouble of setting up my business profile in the Lyft app.
The Loyalty Loop
When brands and their products offer repeat purchases, they’re presenting an opportunity for consumers to enter a loyalty loop. The first time we decide between brands, we consider trade-offs and come up with what we believe is the best choice. Upon making a purchase, we’ll then build expectations based on our actual experience that will influence future purchase decisions.
If we have a positive experience and are presented with a future purchasing opportunity, we’ll shortcut the full decision-making process and choose the same brand again. We call this loyalty. Brands love this because they don’t have to re-convince us to purchase their products once become a loyal customer. We as consumers love it because we don’t have to spend the energy to make decisions again.
However, a bad experience can trigger the beginning of the evaluation process all over again. As consumers, we hate this. We don’t want to spend the time and energy doing due diligence on every purchase we make, which is why we’re happy to be loyal to brands that give us a reliably positive experience. Having to actively engage our brains on evaluating new brands and products is laborious, so we tend to get frustrated when a brand to which we had been loyal delivers a bad experience and forces us to enter the evaluation loop again.
If we go back to my example with Uber and Lyft, you may have noticed that I mentioned I didn’t have much of an emotional reason for choosing Uber over Lyft. It was “fine”. But after having a negative experience, the magnitude of my emotions was much higher (in the negative direction), causing a trigger that broke the loyalty loop.
The dark pattern of high switching costs
When I got fed up with Uber and decided to switch to Lyft, there was virtually no switching cost. I had already used Lyft previously and only needed to spend about three minutes setting up my business profile. No big deal.
However, many complex purchasing decisions have very high switching costs. For example, let’s say you have a poor experience with your email help desk solution. They may have triggered a break in the loyalty loop, but if your implementation is complex and switching would require training multiple teams, you may not get very deep in the evaluation process before giving up and deciding that switching isn’t a priority.
Do you see the opportunity for a dark pattern here? If you as the vendor know that your customer’s switching cost is high, you could allow yourself—you’d never do it intentionally, of course not—to let the quality of your experience fade. Even if you deliver a poor experience that triggers a break in the loyalty loop, customers may not churn because of high switching costs. I suspect this would “work” for the vendor in the short term.
If you’re delivering a subpar experience and everything seems okay because your churn numbers are low, what’s the problem?
The problem is that loyalty doesn’t live with a business—loyalty lives with humans. People won’t advocate for your product or brand if you’ve broken their loyalty loop. And if they leave their current company and go somewhere else, they’re not going to automatically choose your brand and product, forcing them to enter the full due diligence process to find a new vendor.
Don’t trigger a break in the loyalty loop
The key takeaway here is that you want to avoid triggering a break in the loyalty loop. If a customer has spent the time and energy to choose your brand and your product to meet their needs, don’t give them an opportunity to begin the decision-making process all over again.