Watch Out for Sticky Relationships

Some of the largest companies around today actively build sticky relationships with their customers. That means companies try to ‘lock in’ customers in relationships for certain periods and penalize them if they try to ‘get out’. Cell phones and banking come to mind here. It’s a particular type of mentality that wants to lock in short term business but isn’t thinking about building long term value. Quite often, companies ask customers to make a significant investment in the business relationship but do they care whether the customer is having a good experience or not? For any business it comes down to this: are you treating your relationship with customers as an asset that you are actively trying to increase? Or are you feeding off your customer base and essentially dissipating your asset? A kind of churn and burn strategy where you focus on numbers not relationships. If customers have a good experience with your business, why would you need to lock them in? They will keep coming back, again and again and again!