Backwards Reward System

In a recent conversation with Peter Leung, the Marketing Director for Posh Charcoal Collaboration Dining (one of our new clients!) the topic of rewarding your clients came up.

Think to your own experience as a consumer for a minute, have you experienced the following:

1). You signed up for a service, only to have the next guy to sign up getting a better deal but now you can’t back out of yours.

2). You’ve been with a company for 5 years, but the guy who just signed up got a great gift with purchase that was never offered to you.

3). Your service provider screwed up, so you called customer service. After an hour you got a refund, better plan and a deal for the next 3 years.

If you answered yes to any of the above you’re experiencing the “backwards reward system”. It’s not a scientific term, but it’s exactly what it says. As a consumer, it seems like you have to be the nasty kind to get anywhere. To be a good customer, is to be a dumb customer.

From a company point of view, it’s more costly to obtain new customers than it is to keep existing ones. So why is the lack of care and reward to those who are supporting your business? It seems like many businesses and corporations simply do not have a good consumer care system in place. Instead, they develop this thing called a contract so that clients are locked-in regardless of their animosity levels.

This scheme of “who cares if you’re peeved, I’ve got you locked in for another 3 years anyway” might have worked all through the last decade but as Social Media trends skyrocket in popularity and more and more main stream media are taking focus, consumers will have their voice heard and heard by many. If you are a company in the wrong, it will be voice, and it will be heard. At that point, you’re left constantly filling the consumer happiness hole.

It’s time to re-evaluate your consumer care program and put something more concrete in place. Reward your good customers. Those Fido Dollars were a good try, but didn’t work in practice.