The Disappearance of Brand Loyalty: A Rant

Why Companies Are Losing Touch with Their Customers and How It Affects Us All

Have you watched the Apple TV series Acapulco? It's a charming series set in a Mexican hotel, offering light entertainment when you need a break. Minor spoiler alert: at the beginning of the series, the hotel staff motto is "the guest gets what the guest wants." By the end, decades later, it's changed to "the guest gets what the guest qualifies for." It made me chuckle. Through travel hacking, I ensure you qualify for much more, but that’s a topic for another time.¹

Where I'm going with this is…

What's with all these brands not understanding customer loyalty anymore? To pick on one, I've used Bit.ly for link shortening for years—if not decades—until they recently decided I wasn’t paying enough and stripped away functionality to the point of making their app unusable.

After some frustration, and trying to make it work in a now broken app, I gave up. It took me (almost) half an afternoon to migrate my links to a self-hosted option. For free. And (again, almost) all my historic links still work. With nearly a thousand posts on this blog, going through them all to update links wasn’t going to work for me. Following the 80-20 rule (or in this case more so 99-1 rule), the self-hosted alternative has been proven to be more than good enough for what I need.²

There has to be a better way

I prefer to work with apps and businesses that do things the right way. To showcase that not all is lost, I want to mention two exceptions to the all-too-common rule of hyperinflation and ripping off customers:³

1. Shoutout to LeadPages, which I’ve used for some of my websites and all of my landing pages for quite a while now. They've never increased their rate on me, one of their key points being to lock in your rate forever. Sometimes people ask how much it costs to get someone to build a website. My response? Why pay anyone to build it when doing it yourself is SO easy and affordable?

2. Another shoutout to DreamHost, which I use for some of my other projects (and recently for my own "mini" version of Bit.ly). I don’t think they’ve increased my VPS (Virtual Private Server) rate ever. And this, my friends, is how you keep loyal customers.

I love brands and apps that honor their long-term customers by grandfathering in original pricing instead of increasing rates and decreasing functionality. For a PDF of my favorite apps, text #apps to 604-210-8668, and I'll send you a link.

Service is a mindset

Customer service in general continues to be a disaster for most companies. How often do you still hear a pre-recorded message or see in the automatic email response that “we are experiencing higher than normal volume and may be delayed in responding?”

Give me a break. Companies can no longer use “unprecedented” circumstances and “high volume” as an excuse for slow or poor service. It seems everyone turned this on during the Covid pandemic and conveniently “forgot” to turn it off after things went back to (sort of) normal. The only thing that’s now truly unprecedented is their ability to shift gears and prioritize customer service. Just saying.

Who else is tired of hearing this? Get it together folks… service is a mindset, not a department.

Service Is A Mindset, Not A Department

Let's Start a Conversation

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this! Here are a few questions to get the conversation going. Text me your answers:

1. Have you ever stopped using a brand or service because of poor customer service or unfair pricing changes? What was your experience?

2. Which companies do you think are doing a great job with customer loyalty and why?

3. How do you handle it when a company you rely on changes its pricing or reduces its service quality?

4. What do you think companies could do better to maintain your loyalty as a customer?

Let’s not settle for mediocre service. Raise your standards, ask for better service, and choose to do business with companies that honour their customers. Together, we can create a market where loyalty is truly valued.

1. Obviously, I’ve written a few things about travel hacking before. 😃

2. This isn’t a technical blog per se, but if you want to know the steps I took to install a self-hosted solution on my Dreamhost VPS, export my Bit.ly links for free using their API, and import them into my new system, feel free to message me.

3. If you buy from these links I may earn a small referral bonus, you will likely get a better deal (and better service).