Last week I wrote about my unfortunate service incident with Delta Airlines that made me question my loyalty to the company. That got me digging a little deeper into how vulnerable customer loyalty really is. The statistics I found revealed some solid quantitative evidence of how vulnerable customer loyalty can be. I want to share with you some of the numbers that I discovered.
Loyalty is Not What It Used to Be
An Accenture survey of 25,426 consumers in 33 countries reveals that 77% of consumers admitted to retracting their loyalty more quickly now than they did three years ago. More importantly, loyal customers who spent more with a brand switched to another brand or provider 17% more often in the previous year than those who spent less. These loyal consumers were also 9% more likely to retract their loyalty altogether. Similar findings have come from an earlier study reported in Harvard Business Review, where best banking customers may be the first to defect when a new option becomes available.
Not only have loyal customers become more fickle, but many consumers are not inclined to be loyal in the first place. The Accenture survey shows that 36% of consumers consider loyalty to be irrelevant to their spending. In a separate survey of 7000+ consumers by Corporate Executive Board, only 23% of consumers were interested in having a relationship with brands. A study by McKinsey further shows that many retailers’ best customers are indeed just heavy users that spend a lot at competitors too. For a large DIY chain, 45% of lost revenues to competitors were through the chain’s best customers.
What Makes Loyalty Vulnerable
Statistics show that it is increasingly likely for consumers to switch brands at the drop of a hat. Not surprisingly, price is a big reason. According to GfK MRI’s The Survey of the American Consumer, 49% of consumers will “gladly switch brands to use a coupon”, and that number increases to 60% for mobile coupon users.
Poor customer service is another vulnerable spot for customer loyalty. Statistics abound on this point. The 2017 American Express Customer Service Barometer Study shows that more than half of Americans have stopped a planned purchase or transaction because of bad service, and that 33% say they’ll consider switching companies after just a single poor service encounter. A former KissMetrics report shows that 71% of consumers had ditched a company because of poor customer service, and the value of each lost customer averaged $243 globally and $289 in the US. The vulnerability in customer service carries over to Millenials. A poll conducted by Morning Consult earlier this year shows that 74% of Millenials would be less likely to purchase from a company if they had poor customer service.
In Conclusion
I am not citing all these statistics to discount the concept of customer loyalty. I am still a strong believer in the value of true customer loyalty. There is some good news in the mix of numbers too. The Amex study earlier also shows that consumers’ general evaluation of customer service quality has increased from the level in 2014. The Morning Consult poll shows that some brands such as YouTube, Google, Netflix, Amazon.com, Sony, and Pixar still enjoy much love from Millenials.
All the statistics I compiled here simply tell us that loyalty is much harder to come by today, and evidence suggests that consumer expectations may be outpacing the speed of the brand. Satisfaction is no longer enough. To earn consumers’ loyalty, companies need to better leverage customer insight from research and analytics to stay relevant and to build the right connections with the right customers.