The term “disloyalty program” is not what it may seem—a program designed to lose credibility in the eyes of your customers. Instead, and perhaps surprisingly, it is a form of effective loyalty-building based on partnership premise, and it’s gaining marketing popularity.
And a better understanding of it could well open up paths to other amazing promotional ideas.
A Loyalty Strategy Can Be a Two-Edged Sword
Customer loyalty is the “prize” that every business seeks. Appealing as it may seem, loyalty programs pose some hidden risks that businesses may not notice in the short run, but they can have negative effects in the long run.
Customers with loyalty incentives tend to have higher expectations of products and services. Eventually, because of those expectations, they will implicitly demand an upgrade in service and in goods quality, along with more generous incentives. The situation creates a burden for businesses to continually up the ante—in both customer care and product quality.
Moreover, a small mistake can undermine all of your painstaking efforts. Starting a business is anything but easy, but keeping customer is an entirely different type of difficult. Long-term customers may forgive a mistake once, but their satisfaction will have slightly decreased; and if businesses fail them again, they are likely to turn away, which may result in the worst-case scenario: being abhorred by formerly loyal customers.
A Brief Origin Story of Disloyalty Programs