Surviving consumer dictatorship: Loyalty is no longer guaranteed

Modern consumers are no longer satisfied with being “delighted” by good service; rather, they expect instant results, full transparency, and absolute flexibility - all on their terms. And, if they don’t get what they want, they switch brands without hesitation.

With the rise of Consumer Dictatorship, brands can no longer just look to improve customer experience (CX) but must build new models that embrace customer control. The pervasiveness of technology designed to enhance CX has erased differentiation between brands, and customers have come to expect good experiences as the standard.

In this world where brands that cling to traditional Customer Experience strategies will likely die, while those that embrace customer-led innovation, real-time responsiveness, and absolute flexibility will thrive, how do businesses begin to adapt for the future?

Shift from ‘Managing’ to ‘Empowering’

Empowering these customers should focus on eliminating their dependence on the brand for resolution and giving them the tools to shape their experience on demand.

Rather than managing customer journeys, businesses are now able to enable customers to create their own, based on past behaviours. This works best in areas where there is high friction (such as onboarding or billing queries), there are repeated contacts for the same issue or where there is a drop in engagement or an uptick in churn. 

To achieve success here, brands must embrace adaptive, real-time technologies that give customers control, such as portals with full visibility into usage, billing, network health, etc, AI-powered self-diagnosis tools for outages, API integrations that allow seamless switching or upgrading of services, and more.

From an experience perspective, companies will need to build feedback loops directly into the customer journey to identify where customers feel stuck or powerless, while customer-facing teams must evolve from reactive support to experience facilitators.

This will require the empowering of frontline staff to make decisions without hierarchy, training on emotional intelligence and rapid resolution thinking, and real-time access to customer data to personalise engagements.

Adopt a real-time, zero-latency mindset

Another feature of Consumer Dictatorship is that modern customers expect access to support, services and products on demand - and they are not willing to wait. To meet this requirement and eliminate delays in service, responses and fulfilment, businesses need to decentralise decision-making so that front-line staff can act instantly, and automate intelligently - not to replace humans, but to reduce friction. Getting this right requires organisations to make a few key changes:

• Horizontal integration of systems: data silos are the enemy of real-time CX, and all departments must access and operate from a single source of truth.
• Micro-decision empowerment: real-time enablement over slow escalations requires that the organisation push decision-making power to the frontline through guidelines, and not rules.
• Predictive operations: use data to preempt customer needs, for example, triggering support when line degradation is detected.

Businesses can ensure consistency in decentralised environments by establishing a CX Playbook that’s principle-based and not rule-based (e.g. "Resolve with empathy and urgency" instead of "Log ticket, wait 24 hours"), using real-time dashboards that reflect live customer experience metrics across teams, and leveraging internal gamification or scorecards to align behavior to outcomes (e.g. time to first response, resolution NPS).

Re-think loyalty as a daily battle

With more businesses turning to enhanced CX to differentiate themselves from the competition, brand loyalty is no longer a byproduct of these experiences, but a fleeting privilege that is not earned once but must be won every day.

This will require them to continuously innovate to stay ahead of shifting expectations, reward real engagement rather than just transactions, and listen, adapt and act in real-time to customer feedback. 

Today’s consumer wants more than service - they want belonging and recognition. Brands can foster this feeling through community-building efforts that offer customers a platform to connect digitally or through physical events, co-creation initiatives that let customers vote on new services, features, or CSR projects, or through engaging in hyperlocal partnerships with content creators and local organisations.

Organisations can even look toward proactive appreciation, such as the celebration of anniversaries and milestones with a personal touch - eventually, the brands that feel human will outlive the ones that just feel efficient.

Build crisis-proof brands

The internet has given customers access to more information than ever before, and they expect this level of transparency from the brands they interact with. In the instance of a fibre network operator such as Frogfoot Networks, this can include billing transparency, publicly available real-time service health dashboards, transparent service level agreement statistics, and network upgrade roadmaps. 

It is now expected that brands own up to their mistakes before they are exposed by customers and subject to reputational and financial harm. Furthermore, companies also need to look at aligning with customer values as ethics now influence purchasing decisions.

If your brand is using AI, outsourcing, or making environmental decisions, say it before they ask. If businesses don’t tell their story, customers will write their own - and often, it won’t be kind. The age of Consumer Dictatorship isn’t coming - it’s already here.

The question is no longer how to improve Customer Experience, but rather how brands survive in a world where the customer rules with an iron fist. It starts by moving beyond simply asking “Did they like the service?”, and asking “Did they stay, did they return, and did they tell someone else to try us?”.

Dheeraj Gowrie, Executive: Assurance, at Frogfoot Networks