“Surprise and delight” is a phrase often tossed around in business meetings. “We need to surprise and delight our customers!” senior managers cry out! “We need to provide them with unexpected rewards and promote customer loyalty!”
No. You don’t.
You need to solve a problem for your customer. That’s it. If you can solve a problem for a customer and continue to do so, then you have a customer for life. There is a famous saying. “If it ain’t broke…don’t fuck with it!”
I had always used Norton Utilities up until last year. When Norton went to a digital model (as in no install CD) I set up auto-renewal and more or less forgot about it. The auto-renew price was whatever the current price for the product was and so I left it alone. Problem solved.
Until last year when I noticed that the price was almost $100! So I went online and looked and it turned out that the product was being sold for $49 on the website. I was like, “WTF?!!” So I took a look at my subscription history and sure enough over the past 10 years they had bumped the price up year after year. But not the price of the product, the price of the renewal.
This was the opposite of surprise and delight.
What they had done was solve one problem but introduce a new problem. The problem of having to make sure I don’t get screwed. That is not a problem I want to keep dealing with. I cancelled my subscription, got my money back, and went on the hunt for a new solution for my computer security problem.
I looked at comparisons and eventually settled on Bitdefender. They had a good reputation and I knew people who were happy with the service so I signed up. Look at this email I got a yesterday.
Ninety dollars didn’t smell right to me. I remembered paying around $45 for the service. When I went into their system yesterday to turn off the auto-renew it offered a 50% off discount, which was the same price they had on the homepage for everyone else. But it only offered it after I had turned off the auto-renew. Otherwise it was going to charge me the $90.
There is no discount, there is no special benefit in being an existing customer despite what they post on their website.
I recognize that some MBA was worked out the customer churn rate vs the increased incremental revenue by charging more for renewals. And I am sure it is profitable but it leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths and is short-term thinking. Long-term thinking is to solve the problem and show you can keep solving it reliably so that your custom can count on you.
Look at what the price is now! Less than a third of what I would have been auto-renewed at.
You know what would have surprised and delighted me? If the email instead had read,
“Hey Dave, your renewal is coming up in a month, but right now it there is a Black Friday sale. We know you’re busy but if you renew right now, you can get it for $27. Otherwise don’t sweat it and we will renew for you at the lowest advertised price.”
If I had gotten that, I would have told everyone I know. I would have posted it on this blog, instead of this rant. I would have had my problem solved, and been surprised and delighted.