Grateful customers: The reciprocal benefits of customer gratitude

By J. N. Halm

Every business exists to make money—and every business knows that the best way to make money is to ensure that customers are on the side of the business. It is that simple. A business that is in the good books of its customers tends to win on the market. When customers trust a business, they commit to that business. Committed customers go out of their way to ensure that the business does not fail. It therefore makes sense that businesses will do everything in their power to get customers on their side.

But to achieve the level of customer attraction necessary to lead the market, the business must first establish the relationship, develop the relationship, and then maintain the relationship. However, like many other things in this life, this is easier said than done. The fact that many businesses are struggling to attract a critical mass of customers and to make sufficient sales is enough proof that it is not easy to get customers on the side of businesses.

Customers owe no allegiance to any particular business and would move to the competition if they were given a reason to—such as a better offer or a terrible performance by the business in question. The performance of a business—represented by the performance of its customer-facing employees—is one of the most important factors in determining how customers commit to the business.

It is interesting however that researchers used to believe that the factors that affect the way businesses perform when it comes to selling to customers are the trust and commitment of the customer.

In other words, when customers trust and commit to a business, the sales professionals tend to perform better. When a customer trusts a business professional, the professional tends to be more motivated to do much more. This has been the overriding conviction for decades.

Quite recently, however, there have been studies that show that there are other factors that lead to sales and marketing professionals performing better. That is to say, that trust and commitment are just not enough to determine the performance of the sales professional. Among these other factors, customer gratitude has been found by researchers to be very important in getting sales and marketing professionals to perform better on the job.

Gratitude has been defined as “the emotional appreciation for benefits received.” A study titled “The Role of Customer Gratitude in Relationship Marketing” found it to be true that customer gratitude indeed has a role to play in the performance of businesses. According to the researchers behind the study, when customers express gratitude to customer-handling professionals, the professionals go out of their way to put in more effort.

However, customer gratitude is generated as a result of what the professional initially put into the relationship. By treating customers well, customers become grateful and as they express their gratitude, it leads to reciprocal behaviours from the sales professional.

When a customer sees a seller going the extra mile, the customer tends to be very grateful for the extra effort. When a customer realises that a customer-handling professional has gone above the call of duty to favour the customer, it tends to make the customer more grateful.

The level of customer gratitude rises when the customer realises that the professional has taken great risks to go out of their way to serve the customer. Sometimes, all it takes for the business to provide small favours or considerations, such as gift vouchers, hampers, giveaways, etc. These gifts have a way of impressing customers—and impressed customers tend to be grateful customers.

Talking of gratitude, there are two very important aspects that must be considered. Feelings of gratitude fall under the Affective aspect of gratitude. The other aspect of gratitude is the Behavioural aspect. It is one thing for a customer to feel grateful and it is another thing to act grateful. Such customers, as a show of appreciation, will go out of their way to ensure that the business succeeds.

Grateful customers are those who will go out of their way to bring in other customers, thereby acting as an unofficial marketing force for the business. It is grateful customers who will stand for and defend the organisation if someone says something they do not agree with. It is such gratitude-based reciprocal behaviours that result in the real benefits of customer gratitude.

The gratitude of customers leads to prosocial behaviours that also lead customer-facing professionals to go out of their way to do more for their customers. As business professionals go out of their way to do more for their customers, those customers then do more for the business in return.

This creates what one can confidently refer to as a “cycle of reciprocity”, characterised by giving and counter-giving. This is what accounts for why some customers can stay with one business for years on end. Because each time there is an interaction, one party goes out of its way to give more to the other party. At each interaction, one party feels it owes a debt of reciprocity to the other party.

I find the above discussion quite interesting because it has the potential to change the way sales and marketing professionals view their roles. For many salespeople, the belief is that customers are doing them a favour by patronising what they have on offer. This is not the right approach to selling. The professional seller should see an engagement with a prospect as an opportunity to make the prospect’s life better. If anyone is doing the other a favour, then it is actually the seller who is doing the buyer a favour. The seller is giving the buyer an opportunity to make use of a product or service that would make the buyer’s life better. This is the way great sales and marketing professionals think—and this accounts for why they make more sales.

What that kind of thinking does is that it takes away the desperate need sales professionals have to hear a “Yes” from a prospect. Desperation on the part of a seller is one of the things that tends to put prospects off. Why is a seller “desperate” if the one’s offer is a good one? That is the question that prospects ask when they encounter a desperate sales and marketing professional.

The answer many prospects will come up with is that then the offer might not be a good one. The best way to turn a prospect into a customer is to always get the prospect to buy out of one’s own free will and volition. People want to believe they are in charge of their lives and responsible for their own decisions.

Customers are human. This is something every customer-handling professional must understand. As humans, emotions play a very important role in the actions and inactions of customers. Expectedly, emotions play a role in affecting the relationship between businesses and customers. When people feel they have received a benefit from someone, there is always that psychological pressure to also want to give something back. It is like paying back a debt the one owes.

Sales, marketing, business development, customer service and other customer-handling professionals must understand this and therefore go out of their way to put in their very best into every customer relationship. By going out of their way to treat customers well, customer-facing professionals put pressure on the customer to want to do something good back for the business.

When a customer does something good in return for the business, that customer becomes happy and this further strengthens the relationship. Businesses should know this and take advantage of this to enhance their relationship with their customers.

It is, however, important to also note that when the customer fails to return the good they have received from the business, for whatever reason, that customer would feel bad. People are hardwired to want to do something back for those they believe they have received something of value from. There is a guilt therefore that the customer feels. If this guilt is not managed well, it could also affect the business-customer relationship.

When businesses are planning on where to invest funds to improve their operations, gratitude might not appear on the list. The business will look at investing in the latest state-of-the-art widgets and gadgets on the market. Money will be spent on cutting-edge market research and studies, just to get the edge over the competition. The business might bring in very expensive consultants to bring in the latest ideas on how to move the business forward.

But from the above discussion, it is clear that customer gratitude can be a game changer—and so it is. On the face of it, customer gratitude might not even seem like a sound business strategy. However, when one considers the fact that gratitude is a universal emotion and the reciprocity it generates in those who feel grateful is also universal, it begins to look quite appealing as a business strategy.

Gratitude and its attendant reciprocity are so universal that individuals who do not seem to exhibit these traits are considered sociopaths. As one researcher puts it, “The mere recognition of a benefit seems to generate a sense of obligation to repay.” The job of the customer-facing professional, regardless of the one’s role, is to create grateful customers, because grateful customers tend to repay their debts!

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