中文4570字
标题：Customer Retention Is Not Enough
原文：company how likely customers are to defect; mobile-phone customers, for instance, continually switch providers because of customer service problems. But satisfaction alone doesn't tell a company what makes customers loyal: the product or the difficulty of finding a replacement, for example. Nor does gauging satisfaction levels tell a company how susceptible its customers are to changing their spending patterns—variations that more often come about as a result of changes in their lives, in the company's offer, or in its competitors' offers. Understanding the other drivers of loyalty; our research showed, is crucial to having an influence on migration.
By learning to understand why customers exhibit different degrees of loyalty, and combining that knowledge with data on current spending patterns, companies can develop loyalty profiles that define and quantify six customer segments (Exhibit 2). Three of them can be viewed as loyalists; that is, they are maintaining or increasing their expenditures. These customers are loyal because they are emotionally
attached to their current provider, have rationally chosen it as their best option, or don't regard switching
as worth the trouble. The remaining segments—the downward migrators—have one of three reasons for spending less: their lifestyle has changed (as a result, say, of moving or having babies), so they have developed new needs that the company isn't meeting; they continually reassess their options and have found a better one; or they are actively dissatisfied, often because of a single bad experience, with a rude salesclerk, for example.
For industries that don't have many competitors capable of meeting the basic needs of their customers, active dissatisfaction plays the strongest role in downward migration. As the number of competitors providing a minimum level of satisfaction increases, other factors tend to assume a larger role; customers are more likely to compare the merits of various voice mail options, for instance, once phones can be counted on to work reliably.
Three basic customer attitudes—emotive, inertial, and deliberative—underlie loyalty profiles.[1] Emotive customers are the most loyal. Feeling strongly that theircurrent purchases are right for them and that their chosen
product is the best, they rarely reassess purchasing decisions. These feelings can reflect a product's long record of good performance, but they are often fostered by intangible factors. Soft drinks are a cla
ssic example: they are very similar, but nearly half of all people who purchase them have strong favorites. Our research shows that emotive customers generally spend more than those who deliberate over purchases and migrate at a much lower rate. Emotive people are thus, rightly, the marketers' Holy Grail, and companies will find value in increasing the proportion of their customers in this group.
Inertial customers, like emotive ones, rarely reassess their purchases, but their inaction results from high switching costs or a lack of involvement with products. Utilities and life insurers are good examples of industries whose customers tend to be inertial. Although these customers aren't prone to spend more or less than they currently do, influencing them offers about as much opportunity as influencing emotive customers, largely by making them less likely to migrate downwardly in response to shocks such as price hikes, isolated cases of bad service, and lifestyle changes.
customer的中文意思Deliberators—both those who maintain their spending and those who spend less—are on average the largest group, representing 40 percent of all customers across industries. The rewards from influencing deliberators can be twice as high as the rewards from influencing emotive and inertial customers. Deliberators frequently reassess their purchases by criteria such as a product's price and performance and the ease of doing business with a company. Emotional appeals won't trump such objective factors,
although these customers' requirements vary from person to person. Retail gasoline and groceries are the kinds of products that draw a preponderance of deliberative customers. Deliberators who value convenience and quality in a grocery store, for example, would likely choose a nearby grocer with a gourmet deli. A more value-conscious customer might well choose a more distant store offering better prices. Still, both of those customers would constantly reevaluate their decisions by considering the specific purpose of a trip or new information.
Finally, many companies make little effort to meet their customers' changingneeds, which (besides those brought on by moving or having a child) might include new financial or insurance products for aging customers and new travel
arrangements made necessary by updated corporate-travel policies. Although changing needs are often dismissed as uncontrollable, our work shows that they can be addressed, especially if a company invests in a new product or channel. Meeting these new needs is a smaller but relevant part of the overall loyalty opportunity.
Profiling customers
Our research also showed that the proportion of people in each loyalty segment differs by industry (Ex
hibit 3); we found, for example, that far fewer customers are emotionally attached to their grocery stores than to their long-distance providers. For both mobile-phone providers and Internet service providers, however, deliberators predominate, so even among different kinds of telecom companies, the proportions in each segment can vary a lot.
This fact implies that the reasons for migration differ greatly among industries. Deliberative customers, for example, who change their spending patterns because of factors like convenience, account for more than 70 percent of reduced spending by purchasers of casual apparel but only one-third of reduced spending by mobile-phone customers. These

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