The Five (Customer) Love Languages

In 1992, marriage counselor Gary Chapman published a book about the five universal ways of demonstrating love, The Five Love Languages. Since then, it has spent more than 350 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

While researching our new book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers, we found that companies that treat their customers with love outperform their competitors and boast happier employees. So what might leaders learn from Chapman’s insights? Let’s tick through each of the five.

Customer love language 1: Words of affirmation

Customers want to know a company values them and their loyalty. American Express, a leader in customer NPS, famously lists a “Member Since” date on the front of every credit card.

Customer love language 2: Quality time

As the world moves digital, new experiences can bring frustrations—not being able to reach a live person to resolve an issue, time-consuming processes to cancel a subscription, etc. But well-designed digital experiences can help companies devote just the right amount of quality time to customers and show you want to make their lives easier.

Customer love language 3: Acts of service

Many customers today value brands that enrich their lives and make the world a better place. One example: To help the tens of thousands fleeing a life-threatening crisis in Afghanistan, hosting platform Airbnb partnered with resettlement agencies to fund temporary stays for 20,000 Afghan refugees, waiving fees and providing support for hosts who offered short-term stays for free or at a discount. Now they hope to fund another 20,000.

Customer love language 4: Gifts

For customers, it truly is the thought that counts. The monetary value of a gift is far less important than the thoughtfulness, the surprise, and the delight in the moment. And gifts aren’t necessarily physical things. An experience can also be a gift, as many companies in the travel and leisure industry understand well. 

Customer love language 5: Touch

Many companies increasingly pair digital options with live interaction and retail experiences that are real and human. Think of digitally native customer-love champion Warby Parker, which has expanded its retail store network as customers seek out hybrid experiences. Now they’re in person and human when they need to be (when getting an eye exam, for example) and not when they don’t (say, when replacing yet another pair of lost eyeglasses). 

For more examples and perspective on this, check out Darci’s recent article, “Speaking the 5 Languages of (Customer) Love.”

Recommended listening

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, our colleague Rob Markey interviewed Maureen on the Net Promoter System Podcast about surveying customers during this tumultuous time and the importance of passing their thanks along to employees as inspiration and motivation. “A lot of these employees have traditionally been treated pretty poorly by customers,” Maureen noted. “If this is a moment when we understand that those folks coming to work every day at banks, at grocery stores, are really essential, that’s a good thing, and those employees should hear directly from customers.” This message is just as relevant today as essential workers round out a second year of pandemic service. It’s worth a listen.

Customer love highlight of the week

Thinking about the languages of customer love, we were reminded of one amazing story we heard while putting together Winning on Purpose. In business, acts of service (love language 3) are most often done by frontline employees. In this case it was a FirstService employee. A relatively new lead installer for its California Closets subsidiary, he caught our attention through a five-star Yelp review he’d earned the company. The review had nothing to do with closets, however. It was all about a customer-centric company culture.

The employee had noticed a car with a flat tire pulling out of a convenience store. He alerted the owner and helped put on the emergency spare, turning what could have been a horrible day into “a heart-warming day,” as the reviewer wrote. The employee later told his supervisor that he felt confident taking time out of his work schedule for this act of kindness because it was the right thing to do and he believed the company trusted him to make the right decision.

Customers value acts of service for the greater good, and they recognize and appreciate it when employers allow the humans at the front line to make choices that serve them well.

This is part of a series of posts, written with my Bain colleagues Maureen Burns and Darci Darnell, exploring the pioneering firms that are implementing Net Promoter System principles to make digital frontline experiences more human and delightful. Our new book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers, is now on sale.

I hope you’re enjoying reading this newsletter as much as I am putting it together. As a big believer in the word-of-mouth recommendation, I hope you’ll consider spreading the word about Customer Obsession by sharing the newsletter’s link with your LinkedIn network.

Thank you,

Fred