A common assumption behind customer experience initiatives is that there’s a strong connection between loyalty and advocacy: if we deeply satisfy our customers they'll become loyal and recommend us more. Not quite.

First, customers who're neither particularly satisfied / dissatisfied generate only slightly less word of mouth than those at the extremes, because word of mouth is mostly driven by novelty not satisfaction. We share the news, not the olds.

Recommendation rates tend to decline the longer we’ve used a brand because it becomes routine. Contrary to popular belief then, loyal, long-standing customers do relatively little promoting. That’s not all.

Positive word of mouth vastly outweighs negative because it’s more helpful — telling people what not to buy isn’t that useful. Since we talk more about brands we use, the more customers we have the more positive word of mouth we get.

This leads us to a counter-intuitive conclusion: since positive word of mouth depends on the size of our customer base, and growing our base relies on attracting more customers, if we want more advocacy, improving satisfaction and loyalty might not help as much as we think.

Instead a greater focus on customer acquisition and creating more novel, remarkable interactions might be what we need!

See this post on LinkedIn