Soft Underbellies

Tim Manners writes about the "vulnerable soft underbellies" of Apple and NetFlix in a recent Fast Company article.

Apple won't let us do what is ultimately the most important thing. It won't let us easily change the damn battery when it dies... This is not the stuff of which undying customer loyalty is made. They have needlessly left themselves vulnerable to any competitor able to design something of comparable aesthetics and smart enough to let the consumer have life-and-death control over its battery.

The famous Netflix promise is that you can rent as many movies as you want each month for a flat fee. Well, not exactly. Netflix recently acknowledged that it slows down the rate at which it fills the orders of its heaviest users, a practice critics call "throttling."... As with Apple, it took a class-action lawsuit before Netflix would publicly acknowledge that it is giving preferential treatment to its newest -- and least loyal -- customers.

A strategy that punishes one's most loyal consumers is hardly sustainable.

There are so many examples of this. In the wireline telecom world, service providers promote a low per-line rate while adding special surcharges that almost double the advertised price. Consumer electronics are made to last only for the life of the one-year warranty. Wireless and cable providers give special discounts and promotions only to new customers, not to existing ones. Software companies like Symantec offer frustrated virus-infected customers no way to reach a live customer service rep without paying $40 to $70 for the call (which is why I ditched their software).

What is your company doing to sabotage its success with customers? Do you even know the areas where customers are frustrated and may cause them to jump ship? Are you willing to break away from "industry-accepted practices" in order to give customers a more desirable experience?

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Comments

[NITIN ARORA]

Its a dangerous trend in recession to frsutate your loyal customers for getting newer pastures.
Today is the world of Customer Advocacy where you are dependent on the Loyal and higher end customers
to advocate your product to their friends /collegues .

[Robert Bruce]

Dustin,

They are probably very trustworthy.

They simply are not empowered by management with a DOA to allow them to make a call on $2.00

Management are to blame.

[DUST!N]

There's irony in David's experience at Lowe's. Why are the least 'trustworthy' people in a business usually the ones that deal the most with customers?

[David Foster]

One of the ways companies sabotage their customer relationships is by adopting internal procedures which aim at an unrealistically-rigid degree of control. For exampe, I was in a Loew's to buy a plumbing part, value about $2.00. When scanned at the register, it evidently wasn't in the database..my guess would be that it wasn't entered properly during the receiving process. It took **at least 15 minutes** for the clerk to get approval for a price: she talked to something like 5 different people before she finally found someone who had authority and access to override the system and put the price in manually. This was around 10:30 in the morning, and the people in line behind me (who mostly appeared to be professional contractors) were clearly getting more and more pissed.

Systems and procedures should recognize that data will sometimes be imperfect, and should provide for human overrides accordingly.