Earlier this year I celebrated my ten-year anniversary at my current employer. Perhaps "celebrated" is a little over the top. After all, celebration implies festivities, fireworks, music, dancing, champagne, and assorted other intoxicants - legal and otherwise. But alas, there were no fireworks, party, nor even congratulatory emails on this day. Just a smoky, young 24 year-old (single malt scotch, of course - what did you think I was talking about) and a nice hand-rolled, long-filler cigar waiting for me in evening. I think I listened to the album "For Emma, Forever Ago" by Bon Iver - though that's not important - or at least not instrumental to the narrative. What is relevant however is that for the over ten years of my life I have worked at the same employer.
Why haven't I left to pursue other options and greener pastures? Sure there is some sense of comfort that one derives from daily stability and routine. And yes it helps if one fundamentally believes in the work they do. But more importantly, for me it comes down to loyalty. Let me just go ahead and put everything on the table: I don't believe in the practice of premeditatively switching employers every few years to keep one's career in an upward trajectory. Heck, I don't believe in free agency in sports. In fact, I don't even believe in shopping around for a better deal on car insurance. Once you've made a decision to enter a committed relationship, you should stick it out and at least try to make it work.
That being said, people do of course sometimes find themselves in abusive or unproductive relationships, and the correct (though sometimes difficult) thing to do is to move on. I'm not only talking about personal relationships either. This also applies to relationships between customers and companies. For example, if your bank, Telco provider, or retailer is taking advantage of you with poor products, dismal service, and/or restrictive policies - it's definitely time to take your business elsewhere. In the not-too-distant past, consumers involved in a bad relationship with a company often felt as if they were on their own. But today, thanks to social media and online web communities, mistreated customers have supportive network of likeminded individuals only a mouse-click (or thumb-typing) away.
Of course, companies don't want customers to leave. Even the bad companies who completely neglect customers and provide poor customer service will go to great lengths to try keep customers from leaving. A lot of fuss has been made about the practice of promoting customer loyalty (i.e., providing customers with incentives to continue doing business with you rather than a competitor). And with good reason: customer loyalty often leads to greater profitability through repeat business, customer referrals, and even increased price insensitivity. But somewhere along the way, the concept of customer loyalty has gotten confused with customer captivity (i.e., the idea that companies can "lock" their customers into abusive relationships and hold them hostages via long-term contracts and/or highly inconvenient exit barriers).
One of the most common examples of "customer captivity" can be found in the Telco industry where companies systematically steer customers into long-term service contracts that have exorbitant early-termination fees. Customers typically sign an up-front multi-year contract in exchange for the company's lowest rates. However, if a customer was then unhappy with the service, they had little recourse but to switch to another provider and pay a hefty termination fee.
In addition to the use of these "un-incentives" such as high early-termination fees or substantial penalties for early withdrawals, companies often try to make it as painful and difficult as possible for customers to terminate their service and switch to a competitor. I remember that when I wanted to cancel service with my television cable provider, I had to return my cable receiver box myself to a local branch office (though they had been more than happy to send out a technician to do the install in order to get me to join up). The local branch office was actually not very "local" and involved a fairly long commute to seedy section of another town. The good news is my car tires were all still attached when I returned to the parking lot.
Similarly, you probably remember how America Online (AOL) made headlines back in 2006 when its customer service reps were caught literally refusing to take no for an answer from customers asking to cancel their service. Apparently, the company had implemented minimum "save rates" or retention rates along with substantial financial incentives that ended up encouraging call center reps to argue with and sometimes even hang up on customers who called in to cancel their service.
However, as Bob Dylan first crooned over 45 years ago back in 1964, "the times they are a-changin'." AOL became the center of a blog storm and news media backlash in 2006 after one customer recorded his telephone conversation with an abusive AOL customer service rep and posted the transcript on his blog - to which he received over 1000 comments from supporters. In 2008 a California judge ruled that Sprint's early termination fees are illegal. And more recently the US Federal Communications Commission questioned Verizon Wireless about why it suddenly doubled its early termination fee from $175 to $350. So perhaps these trends will serve as signal to companies that people are watching, and more importantly, that people are talking, sharing, tweeting and retweeting on blogs, online forums, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites.
I recently conducted a poll regarding things people would rather do than deal with the hassle of trying to cancel their satellite TV service or switch their checking account (including direct deposit and automatic bill payments) from one bank to another. The results may surprise you.
Research methodology: I initially intended to conduct a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, university study. However, due to overwhelming apathy and lack of motivation, I ended up just surveying a few neighbors, family members, and household pets.
The survey results clearly show that a significant portion of Americans - at least the business professionals (and pets) living in the 3000 block of Hilary Dr., in San Jose, California - would rather clean their own bathrooms, manually upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7.0, or accept Facebook friend requests from people they only consider to be casual acquaintances, rather than try to change their checking account from their current bank to another. And as a general rule of thumb, if your customers dread dealing with your service department so much that they would prefer waterboarding or going through a painful divorce, you probably should look into revamping your customer service offerings.