The post-loyalty era

Recently I’ve been speaking to clients about the concept of the ‘post-loyalty-era’ which is to say that customers are retained these days not by a sense of loyalty but rather because the experience they receive is effortlessly and consistently great.

The truth is that real customer loyalty is harder won in the ‘post-loyalty’ era but with the right approach retaining customers is achievable.

What’s really changed? Over the past 20 or so years customers have turned a blind eye to poor customer experience if they were rewarded with loyalty points or offers that effectively locked them in to a cycle of repeat purchase. This reward based transaction is less about loyalty than about apathy on both sides. The trouble is that some brands have focused so much on attracting and retaining rewards based customers that they’ve dropped the ball on the basics - there is no greater loyalty scheme than exceptionally good customer experience every time.

In the post-loyalty era marketing and CX experts must work together to co-design and communicate exceptional customer propositions and then work relentlessly to deliver products and services that meet and exceed that customer proposition every time.

Customers are much more likely to vote with their feet in the post loyalty era but deliver on the basics and be there when things go wrong and you’ll retain your customers for the long term. In the post-loyalty era the role of marketing and CX experts is to think like a customer and in the final chapter of this book we’ll consider what this actually means