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A legacy is normally seen as a good thing to be enjoying. You might assume that a customer legacy was equally a valuable asset but that is not the way some companies see it. Customer loyalty is great but a customer legacy is a burden.

You can get a sense of that in an Interesting article on device driver compatibility in Vista and Windows 7. See how the Microsoft author feels they should be creating a sense of unease in that long-standing customer:

But essentially what you’ve done here is to make sure the customer understands that there is “potential” (latent) pain that can be avoided with Vista and that that pain may well be a lot more costly than the pain of implementing the solution. To amplify, what you’d be helping the customer understand here is that right now on XP, even though it seems secure (since they’ve likely not had any breaches or successful malware attacks or loss of data), they ARE at higher risk of malware issues (stats show us XP is 60% more susceptible).

The reason why I got onto this line of thinking was that I tried to use the new Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer v.8. It functioned so slowly that I had to uninstall it and go back to Internet Explorer v.7, which I reinstalled. Lo and behold suddenly I was having the same slow speed problems with version 7. Checking on the Internet showed others were having similar problems, but there were no apparent solutions. Then in discussing this problem at Cre8asite Forums, someone mentioned a post by Ed Bott entitled Is IE8 really fat and slow? It seemed that the problem may be associated with still being on Windows XP. He offered the following solution:

So I checked with a few colleagues on some back channels and discovered a tweak that had worked for other people. From a Command Prompt window, I had her run the following command:

regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

That re-registers the ActiveX Interface Marshaling Library, an obscure DLL that most people (even Microsoft experts) had never heard about.

This did work for me, although I have had to re-apply it a few times now since it seems that my version of Internet Explorer v.7 running on Windows XP is in some way no longer as speedy as it used to be.

Microsoft may well regard me as that regrettable customer legacy they have. If only I would upgrade to Vista, all my problems would be solved. It’s a typical product-driven approach to running a business for which Microsoft has been criticised before. However real customer loyalty only develops if companies think very carefully of their customer legacy. If as is suggested above, Microsoft is thinking more on how to incite “potential” (latent) pain among that customer legacy, it does not suggest a very healthy relationship between Microsoft and its customers.

The other aspect of this situation is that any company should Beware of Dissatisfied Consumers: They Like to Blab.

According to new Wharton research, such word-of-mouth communication should be a big cause of concern. Only 6% of shoppers who experienced a problem with a retailer contacted the company, but 31% went on to tell friends, family or colleagues what happened. Of those, 8% told one person, another 8% told two people, but 6% told six or more people. “Even though these shoppers don’t share their pain with the store, they do share their pain with other people, apparently quite a few other people,” according to Wharton marketing professor Stephen J. Hoch.

The complaints have an even greater impact on shoppers who were not directly involved as the story spreads and is embellished, researchers found. Almost half those surveyed, 48%, reported they have avoided a store in the past because of someone else’s negative experience.

Given the explosive growth of Twitter and other social media, these word-of-mouth processes are even more powerful and potentially devastating. Best think very carefully about that customer legacy and try to ensure it is nurtured as the asset of customer loyalty it could become with the right handling.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.