Consumers will be low cost and low maintenance if you reward them

I’ve taken a trip this weekend where all of the arrangements have been made online (not unusual) but more importantly, the company behind each transaction has enthusiastically taken up the opportunity to allow me to act as travel agent, chief inputter of data and also ticket machine (via home printer).

And I’ve not resented it one bit or attempted to calculate the value of my labour in the process – because each company has neatly balanced the immediate incentives for me with the benefit for them.

But I argue that to engender loyalty, companies need to make the leap from offering immediate incentives (e.g. the reward of not having to wait in a queue at the station because you printed your ticket at home beforehand) to also considering the need for long-term incentives, especially when a consumer’s use of a service is frequent.

What would these long-term incentives look like? For me, they’d be about companies taking a portion of the savings and efficiencies I’ve helped created and investing them in providing a small amount of bespoke service at a point of high need – for example, when traffic or connection problems have held me up and I need to know whether my ticket is still valid. Ideally, the company’s decisions about whether to serve me in this way would be triggered by my specific characteristics and usage behaviour.

My suspicion is that few companies actually invest the savings in this way, or do it well. For example, I frequently use Eurotunnel. I always book online and would describe myself as an advocate for their brand - their service is generally fast, efficient & reliable, and when it is disrupted, I appreciate this is due to reasons outside their control.

But in my experience, they also set expectations of services that could provide real value to me (and so reward me for being low-cost), but then don’t deliver on them. A case in point: with each booking, I’m asked to provide my mobile number so that Eurotunnel can update me with information relevant to my journey (and when there are three-hour delays at the terminal it would be useful to get a text before I head out), but it’s never actually been used for this purpose. Instead I have to call a customer information line – a more expensive channel for both of us.

I’m sure all of this was meant to be part of the utopian ‘segments of one’ marketing theory from a few years back, but it still feels like there are few companies really rewarding consumers for laboring on their behalves, so I’m still dreaming of a win-win world where the incentives for me and the company are positive, both short and long term. Any examples out there of companies who really get this right?

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