Customer Loyalty Is Built in Very Boring Moments

You need the model number, so you turn the vacuum over. There are several numbers on the sticker underneath. You spend a few minutes figuring out which is the model number and which is the serial number. Before long, you’re looking at photos of two nearly identical pieces of plastic, trying to work out what makes them different.

Buying the company’s new vacuum would probably go more smoothly. There are colors to choose from, payment plans, and a comparison table. Someone might even pop up in the corner of the screen to see if you need help.

You’d like to keep using the vacuum you already have. That takes a little more work.

An interesting part of our relationship with brands begins here. Until we decide to buy, we get to walk around the world the company has prepared for us. Afterward, we find out how it works.

After the purchase

When companies talk about loyalty, they tend to reach for things that are more fun to talk about. Communities, personalized experiences, exclusive perks, emotional connections. All of that can matter. We might like a brand’s design or feel at home in the world it represents. Sometimes we just really like an ad.

A lot of the time we spend with a product, though, involves more ordinary tasks.

We try to figure out whether our warranty registration went through. We check whether a new filter fits the model we own. We want to know whether the item we returned has arrived. We tell someone in customer support about a problem we just finished explaining to someone else.

A company would probably pick different moments to introduce itself. These tell us quite a bit about it anyway.

Take the system that knew exactly what I bought when it sold it to me, then asked me the same question when I needed help. There may be perfectly understandable technical reasons for that. Different systems, different teams, decisions made over several years. From the customer’s side, it feels like giving the same company the same information over and over again.

At some point you start to feel that your purchase came with a small administrative job.

Finding out what happens next time

Research on customer effort lends some weight to these everyday frustrations. In a study published in 2023, Caroline Ardelet and Christophe Benavent looked at more than 314,000 interactions with 96 brands. In general, satisfaction fell as the effort required of the customer went up. The relationship varied by industry and by how people contacted the company.

It would be a stretch to conclude that every company that makes things easy will earn loyal customers. People switch brands over price. They switch when a better product comes out. Sometimes they just want to try something else.

Still, I think these little encounters add up to an answer to a question we’ll ask sooner or later. What am I in for if something goes wrong with this company?

When we shop again, we compare products with our previous experience in mind. A part we found easily, a repair process someone explained clearly, or a support conversation that actually got the job done can make the next decision feel a little less uncertain.

That can be a fairly modest kind of loyalty. Sometimes it just sounds like “They made it easy last time.”

That’s already how many of us feel about the businesses we keep going back to.

The system behind a screw

IKEA’s small spare parts service in the UK is a good example. You can order screws, dowels, and other assembly fittings for free. If you use the option that asks for a part number, you’ll need to find it in the product’s assembly instructions. The service page also says these orders can’t be tracked.

A small replacement part can keep an entire piece of furniture in use. The example also shows how much the experience depends on the details. Offering the part for free is one piece of it. You still have to identify the right part, find it, and figure out when it might arrive.

From a product design perspective, this is the part I find interesting. Much of what you see on a spare parts page has to be worked out somewhere else.

Has anyone kept records for older models? Do the names of the parts make sense? Does the company know which products a given part fits? Is the inventory accurate? Can someone in support see more than the customer can?

A few changes to the page will only get you so far. The data, the warehouse, and the people responsible for both have to work together. The customer encounters all of that on the page for the part they need.

When that page falls short, the customer starts bridging the gaps on their own time. They find the manual, take a picture, ask the store, and forward the reply to somebody else. They may meet perfectly helpful people along the way. Everyone involved might be doing their best. The customer can still end up coordinating the whole thing.

Having to learn how a company is organized just to keep using something it sold you is a fairly big design problem.

Getting a reply and getting somewhere

A fast response is another goal that’s easy to misread.

An automated reply can arrive within seconds of sending a support request. We learn that the request was received, that it’s been passed to the right team, and that it matters to the company. All of that may be true. We’re still waiting to hear what happens next.

Sometimes a problem takes time. A part is out of stock. Someone needs to inspect the product. There’s a repair queue. I doubt most people expect every problem to be solved on the spot. It seems reasonable to want to know what you’re waiting for.

Patagonia’s European repair process gives itself two to five working days to review a request and send an update. That’s the timeline for hearing back about the next step. The repair itself comes later.

The company still has to meet that timeline, look at the request, and follow through. But knowing when to expect an update might save a customer from opening the same page every morning to see if anything has happened.

Good design has a fairly modest job here. It can make one of the loose ends in somebody’s day a little easier to manage.

Some problems just need a spare part

We like customer service stories about big gestures. The employee who goes to extraordinary lengths, the unexpected gift, the miles someone travels to put things right. Those stories can be worth telling. If every customer has to find a hero inside the company to get something done, there’s another side to the story.

It’s also hard to say that putting things right leaves the customer more loyal than they were before. A meta-analysis of what happens after a company remedies a service failure found an upside for satisfaction. It didn’t find a statistically significant advantage for intentions to buy again or recommend the company.

I’m a little skeptical of the idea that every problem should turn into an impressive moment for the brand. Sometimes you just want the right part to arrive. You can get off a call with customer support feeling exactly as inspired as you did when you dialed.

Plenty of things can go right without much of a story. You register the warranty. The confirmation arrives. The product shows up in your account when you look for it. If there’s a problem later, the information is there.

We’re unlikely to tell our friends much about any of that. We get on with the rest of the day.

When the little plastic part finally arrives, you fit it, and the vacuum works again. You put the box away and get on with something else around the house.

Months later, when you’re shopping for something new, you may have forgotten the page where you found the part. You still have a vague idea of what it was like to deal with the company. That goes into the decision, too.