How to lose 3 years of customer loyalty in one campaign

Bad profits are like empty calories. They fill a need; they do it quickly. But long term they leave you much worse than before. Barry Moltz profiles Intuit's recent plan to gorge on bad profits at the expense of their long-loyal customers of QuickBooks.

The plan is simple, easy. It's like grabbing a bag of chips or cookies at the checkout line 'for dinner. They announce that some of the best features of QuickBooks right now, like being able to email invoice/invoice receipts directly to your customers, will go away....unless...UNLESS you pay for the upgrade to QuickBooks 2008.

Sweet. Sweet as in empty calories. Intuit will post a spike in revenues and maybe earnings by this forced march of their customers to a purchased upgrade. The inspiration for this idea will likely get a bonus and a round of drinks bought for them one night. Their frontline customer service will field a deluge of calls and emails from angry, long-term customers.   And then revenues will spike downward next quarter. Then growth of new accounts will drop as the only WOM from existing customers is negative. Customer evangelists become customer vigilantes. And then their profits will drop as they spend more on advertising to replace what had been free from their customer evangelists and their testimonials: new customers.

The frontline customer service staff will be directed to try and upsell every caller. That only serves to alienate the remaining customers even more. And the person who got the great big bonus, the cherry on top of the dessert, will be long gone. They'll move to another company who's hungry, and lazy, for some cheap calories. They'll brag about the success and the increase in revenues. The company's too hungry to look more than one quarter. They'll hire this person, and the cycle of bad calorie consumption will consume yet another company.

Sigh. And Intuit is often a case-study, a corporate profile, for the use of Net Promoter Score and customer evangelism and customer loyalty. 

Oh well. Life goes on. Sometimes in business it's not about building a sustainable business model. Sometimes it's about....who knows.