If you think satisfied customers — audiences or advertisers — are also loyal to your products, think again.
eMarketer summarizes a new report from Walker Information that tells a different story.
“The report studied how companies earn the loyalty of their enterprise customers in five industry sectors: wireless service, wireless handsets, Internet service providers, local voice and long-distance voice. … The study found that not one of the industry sectors could claim that even half of its enterprise customers are loyal, yet all the sectors registered customer satisfaction scores of at least 75 percent.”
Chasers near and far see this in the logfiles of their online services. Just look at all the single-page-view sessions from visitors who have never been to a site before, and once that page is served, never return.
You might assume all those visitors came looking for something, and didn’t find it. But it is just as likely they came, they saw, they were satisfied and they left, with no reason to return.
That’s an example of satisfaction that doesn’t translate to loyalty. But why is the distinction important?
Media managers often turn to market research — focus groups, user testing etc. — to get indicators that may help grow and retain audience.
If the primary reason for that research is to measure satisfaction, we might not ask the questions the right way. Then we miss the points that help drive true loyalty — consumer interests and motivations — whether or not we have attempted to address them with our current products.
Those current products may satisfy news, information and commerce needs at many levels. But consumer loyalty is a two-way pipeline. Publishers, editors, developers [okay, everyone] must anticipate the interests and motivations of target audiences, so that the audiences can develop their own anticipation that the resulting products will consistently meet their needs.
Enable a consumer to accomplish one task, and that consumer may be satisfied. Make it clear to that consumer that your product can be counted on to meet many similar needs, and the consumer begins to anticipate you will have solutions. That’s loyalty.
