What does loyalty actually mean in a subscription economy?
Is it simply tenure? Or is it a relationship?
And why, when a customer checks every box—years of service, consistent payments, continued engagement—do they sometimes still have to fight to be seen?
I found myself thinking about this after a recent customer-service experience.
My family has maintained the same mobile relationship for approximately 25 years, surviving acquisitions, brand changes, technology shifts, new devices, new plans and countless monthly payments.
Twenty-five years.
Yet during a recent phone upgrade, I discovered something interesting: longevity itself didn’t seem to mean very much.
After several conversations with customer service, I eventually reached a supervisor who understood the larger question I was asking. It wasn’t simply:
“Can you give me a better price on this phone?”
The real question was:
“After 25 years, does your organization actually recognize that I have been loyal to you?”
That distinction matters.
As CX, UX and Total Experience professionals, we spend enormous amounts of time discussing acquisition, conversion, engagement and retention.
But what happens after retention succeeds?
What does the experience look like for the customer who stayed for 5 years? 10? 15? 25?
If the customer has to announce their loyalty before the organization recognizes it, is that truly a loyalty experience?
Perhaps one of the next opportunities in customer experience isn’t simply designing better loyalty programs.
It’s designing organizations that actually recognize loyalty.
