Just because they leave you, doesn't mean that they don't love you

"Miss, This is not what we agreed when I signed up for the service and it's very unfortunate that we had to come to this point. I will never do business with Your Company again."

The above summarizes the end of a seven year long vendor customer relationship. It didn't have to end like this; during the past seven years, I had been satisfied with the service, I had upgraded several times and I had recommended the vendor's service to family and friends. All in all, I was a Good Solid and Loyal Customer.

The relationship turned sour the day I decided to cancel my subscription due to us moving to a house where the vendor was unable to provide its services. Mind you, I wasn’t unhappy with them. I felt like a valued customer and found it a pity I couldn’t continue with their service.

A few months earlier I had signed up for a new service well aware that we were about to move. When signing up the vendor confirmed that I could terminate the contract if I moved to a location where they couldn’t provide their services. But now, when cancelling, the agent informs me that they would invoice me for the remaining 9 months of my subscription anyway. Expecting there must be some kind of misunderstanding, I inform her about the conversation that I had with the sales person and that I expect them to honor the terms and conditions. - No luck ... No luck what so ever!

I wrote an angry letter and paid the invoice. Finally I got hold of the names of the sales manager and the customer service manager and promised myself to never ever do business with a company where they work.

Sadly enough the above behavior made perfect business sense; the sales team got their sale, finance secured their revenue and for the company as a whole, I had left the company and no longer offered any (short term) potential. And to be honest, the company in question already had lousy NPS and another complaining ex-customer wouldn't make a difference.

I was reminded of the story the other day when I read the excellent report "reimagining customer relationships" from Ernst and Young. The report is based on surveys conducted in 30 countries with some 24,000 participating individual customers. Among their findings, was one key finding that really caught my attention; it was named "Just because they leave you, doesn't mean that they don't love you!".

The name says it all; even loyal and faithful customers might leave you for reasons that you can’t influence. The interesting part of the survey's result was that when asked, there was an identifiable group of customers that were still very likely to recommend the company to its friends and relatives. This group of “Alumni” customer might just be an asset that managers have overseen when they design their end of relationship strategies.

EY suggested actions is that companies must understand their customers better through more insight and build a healthy and relevant communication strategy throughout the customer lifecycle as well as post contract termination. The likelihood of the pleased "alumni" customers returning could be surprisingly high and, as a plus, having them as advocates could provide.

My personal thoughts on this is that in order to gain that deep customer insight required, companies must invest in capabilities to gather the required data over all customer contact points; from customer care/support, chat, emails, opened marketing emails, click-through, visited web pages, social media and data from mobile devices etc. to finally apply statistical methods to truly determine customer intention.

To my knowledge there is currently only one cloud vendors out there, capable of providing companies with the technical and functional capabilities that are required for the above. Oracle, with its latest cloud based customer experience solutions, seamlessly glued together with your company's IT infrastructure through oracle's latest innovation; Platform as a Service, is capable of providing you with what is needed to become a truly customer centric company – regardless whether your customer is a current or an alumni customer.