Often companies treat loyal customers with contempt:

Higher prices

Insurance companies are masters at this tactic although most have the grace to match the online renewal price when you phone them. Which is OK if you’re the kind of person who instinctively goes to an online comparison chart when the renewal letter arrives (we’re sometimes called rate tarts) but less good if you just accept this year’s price unquestioned.

Companies often offer special deals for new customers – that’s relatively standard practice and if the new deal is only for a limited time such as a trial subscription I think that’s acceptable.

It’s quite common in internet marketing to offer a free trial or a low price trial, followed by a full price subscription.

You can keep your customers loyal by grandfathering in the old price.

Yahoo! did this with their online directory: people who were listed free in the early days kept their free entry, those who paid the one-off price for a lifetime listing kept that, newer customers pay the annual listing price.

Aweber did the same for existing customers and I’ve been with them long enough to benefit from that but I don’t get the new bells and whistles in my account that are part of the reason for their latest pricing.

Exclusive offers

These can work well but personally I don’t think they should be better for brand new customers than existing ones.

In other words, unless you’re really unsure about the product or service, an exclusive offer should be tested with existing customers first.

Which is exactly the opposite to the attitude originally taken my podcasting host.

I’ve got through to a different customer service person now and it’s resolved but has still left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

At the time of writing, I’d only been with them a few weeks and I’m paying a monthly fee for a limited amount of uploads per month.

In itself, that’s reasonable – the same kind of deal as every other podcast hosting company.

But when I logged on to my control panel yesterday, there was a big banner and an affiliate link that I could use to offer anyone I recommended unlimited uploads for exactly the same price as I’m paying for limited ones.

If I was on one of their higher packages, I’d be spending more money and getting less back.

Not good.

Not good at all.

I dropped a message to their customer service and (to their credit) I got a reply. But it basically said “tough luck, we’re not going to let you switch to the new package at the same price as you currently pay unless you get someone new to join us”.

The word “shysters” came to mind.

Which was a shame.

When I did my initial research, they seemed like a good enough company.

Even though it’s resolved, I’m still less certain about them.

And with only a handful of podcasts on their service and the fact that I’ve not submitted them to iTunes yet means that I could still change to one of their competitors – Libsyn and Blubrry were the two others on my shortlist.

Customer relationships are fragile

That’s the real message here.

A customer is valuable but only if you look after them.

Word of mouth works but it works much better from a negative standpoint. A fairly recent survey found that over a quarter of people in the USA were “far more likely” to speak about a bad experience than a good one.

You need to make sure that your customers are happy or if you have to fire the occasional customer (and that can happen) that the way you handle them is as good as it can possibly be.

Otherwise you run the risk of upsetting your current customers – the ones who spend more with you.

And some of that comes down to how you handle problems.

If the podcasting company I originally signed up with had answered me with an email that said “you’ve only just joined, the new offer is the same price as the one you’re currently paying, we’ve upgraded your account” I’d have been very happy and would be wholeheartedly recommending them.

Instead, it took several emails including one that said I was going to mention them on my blog, before it was resolved.

I’m mentioning them (but not by name) and implicitly recommending two of their competitors and also thinking of switching away from them.

Which I don’t think is a good reaction from a customer service viewpoint.

I’d be interested to hear your views in the comments on this page.