Insights on Marketing & Technology

Understanding Customer Stickiness (Not the same as Loyalty) 

Where consumers use you more than your competitors (or better still, exclusively), you have stickiness, not loyalty. Stickiness is an observation, not a misappropriation of a word that has meaning in human relationships but not in dealings with people who sell plane tickets or service current accounts.

Stickiness has three clear benefits over loyalty:

1. You can turn stickiness into a verifiable dependable metric, whose movement actually means something to your business.
2. Customer service is a huge component of stickiness: it’s clearly a metric customer service should own and attempt to in uence. Loyalty, of course, becomes the primary domain of people who wear black turtleneck jumpers, invent words like “ideation” and still get to go to lots of Christmas parties.
3. Consumer behavior offers valuable insights into how to drive stickiness through customer service.

Content of this paper (21 pages):

1. Introduction
2. The Psychology of Customer Loyalty
3. Misleading Market Research
4. What Is It if It Isn’t Loyalty? Understanding Customer Stickiness
5. Four Ways to Use Consumer Behavior to Increase Stickiness
6. Vital Tools for Creating Great Customer Experiences
   

7. Summary