Customer Loyalty Do Retailers Care?

[PaulSB]

For years our household shopped at Tesco who through the club card hold massive amounts of data on us. When the kids were young the bill was probably £120-150 a week. Similar can be said of Sainsbury’s if we went there one week for convenience.

Over the years we’ve moved away from supermarkets for varying reasons. I would never return on a regular basis to either Tesco or Sainsbury’s simply because despite holding all this data on me not once has a letter or email arrived asking why we no longer shop with them.

Contrast this with Affect Energy who we switched from to Tonik last week. The day of starting the process an email arrived asking me to reconsider and outlining Affect’s future plans and how they need my custom. I responded, an email conversation took place and though I still left I would go back in the future. If the choice had been between a big 6 company and Affect I would have paid more to stay at Affect.

So why is it these huge companies don’t actually care for their customers and how does that make you feel?

 

[alicat]

I think the big retailers just play the numbers game. If you are an existing customer they want you to spend more and if you are a potential customer they want to draw you in. However, if your circumstances change and it doesn't suit you to shop there or you go off them for some reason then no I don't think they care.

At one time I would have cared. Once I realised that they are called loyalty cards but are really revenue generation cards then I stopped caring.

 

[marinyork]

If you're worked for one of those big retailers you've mentioned you'll know that head office is extremely detached from the rest of the company.

Big retailers go on all the time in chat from managers, store managers, briefings that customers aren't loyal and aren't fussed and just hop from store to store. Some say that so called customer service matters, others say no it doesn't and offer a more basics approach. Tescos used to take this to extreme with their aggressive offer chasing and setting up the planograms to chase the 'premium loyals'. Now the market's changed a lot.

It depends on your business model, take virgin media and it's predecessor for example, it used to spend a lot of its energy running around trying to keep customers with insanely generous discount offers to stop them hopping sky to virgin to sky to virgin to sky to virgin. They worked out more recently this is a waste of time and stopped doing it so much. Seen it for years even on the internet with posts saying I've been with virgin/sky/whoever why don't they care about me a long standing customer and offer me something special. They don't frigging care, of course they don't!

I work in a sector that gives out a lot of 'free' stuff - free advice, free 'services' sometimes even one that lose a lot of money - in the hope of 'loyalty' and 'repeat business' that never appears.

 

[Drago]

Lots of lip service paid to it, but very little evidence that any large organsiation takes the idea seriously.

 

[jefmcg]

Your power company got notice telling them you were switching to another provider. That situation says that you were unhappy with the service they were offering. Sounds like a definite opportunity to try to retain your custom, or at least address your issues to stop others from being unhappy and leaving too. There is nothing creepy about that.

I would never return on a regular basis to either Tesco or Sainsbury’s simply because despite holding all this data on me not once has a letter or email arrived asking why we no longer shop with them.

But there is something creepy about a supermarket modelling your shopping behaviour and feeding back that they have noticed. If a company I had shopped with did that, I'd be more likely to cut up my card and vow never to shop there again. That combined with responses like "sorry, she's dead", "I'm divorced", "Now my eyesight is deteriorating, I can no longer drive and use local shops" etc etc. All of them begging for a angry Daily Mail headline. I think it's likely that they decided that the sort of contact you would like would cost them more customers than it would win back.

This story illustrates my concerns about privacy:

[..]One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.
[..]
A man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

"My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?"

The manager didn't have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man's daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. "I had a talk with my daughter," he said. "It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology."

 

[mustang1]

They don't give a cr4p.