Last week, I was going through my bank statements, and I notice a subscription I’d been paying for that I hand used in over 11 months. Every single month, that money was getting taken out of my bank, and I barely even gave it a second thought.
I hadn’t cancelled because I hadn’t even thought about cancelling it in the first place. The app basically slipped out of my day to day life, but the subscription cost was firmly still in it.
I reached out to the app company, and I told them that I was paying for this subscription but I hadn’t even logged in for 11 months. They turned around to me and said, “Well, you’re still a customer from our perspective, so a refund couldn’t be given.
If we look past the fact that this is a terrible customer experience, I understand why they would have said that.
On paper, am still a customer and a retained subscriber but if we’re honest, the relationship disappeared 11 months back. What I really was is something I call a Zombie Subscriber.
And I think many organisations have far more of them internally and externally than they would like to admit.
Staying isn’t the same as choosing to stay
Think about how many organisations measure the health of their relationships
A subscription business measures it through renewals
A hotel tracks repeat bookings.
Organisations monitor employee retention.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re all useful…
But often, all they tell us is that the relationship continues, They dont tell us why it continues, or if its continuing for the right reasons
Recently, I moved from NatWest to Monzo I’d been with NatWest for over 20 years and this wasn’t just some a normal standard account. I was paying them around £23 a month for their reward platinum account. Do the maths on that and its not a little sum especially as I rarely is ever used it.
For them, from a retention point of view I imagine I was a healthy customer. Then One day, I packed up and left, and went to Monzo. This wasn’t because NatWest was suddenly a bad bank. (However, if you look how they let me go maybe they were) but as a whole the bank was fine.
I just realised that I could have the same kind of banking relationship with Monzo and get a better value exchange between me and them. On top of the usual things NatWest offered me. Monzo Max* gave me benefits I actually could use weekly like cinema tickets, uber eats and a free Greggs…who doesn’t want a free weekly Greggs)
Anyway, For 20 years NatWest could say they’d retained me every month, I was paying them a fee, but what they couldn’t see is how vulnerable that revenue became when I discovered an alternative that felt more valuable to me.
That’s the danger of confusing retention with preference.
Retention tells you who’s paying you, It doesn’t always tell you, who actively choosing you and If it for the right reason. By the time that shows up in your churn numbers, the customer is halfway out
That same thing shows up with employees.
Someone can stay in their role, do the job, hit every meeting and yet slowly but surely pull back the value they contributed such as ideas, curiosity, constructive challenge and insight
In both cases, the employee and customer are still there, and the subscription and relationship are still intact but somewhere in the middle the value exchange is slowly starting to disappear which is the Zombie Subscriber problem.
You don’t necessarily lose value when someone leaves, actually, the loss begins months or sometimes years while they’re still there day in day out
What disappears before people leave?
When organisations look for signs that an experience isn’t working, its normal to look for something negative appearing. This could be increasing complaints, performance dips, or someone eventually leaving.
Often, warning signs aren’t something bad appearing, It’s a simply the disappearing of something that was good
A customer who would normally buy new products and new services now only buys only whats needed.
Someone who would normally recommend your business now stops mentioning it to a friend and starts telling them the reasons why they shouldn’t
An employee who would normally come with new suggestions and ideas that could spark new innovation and growth opportunities for the business now just sits quietly in the corner and nods in agreement.
We take fewer complaints as a sign of improvement yeah, of course, sometimes that is exactly what it means, but other times it isn’t that the problem has disappeared. It’s the fact that the person has just stopped believing that raising it is worth the effort.
I once worked at an organisation where their mission was zero errors for sure it was build on good intentions but guess what happens?
People stopped reporting the errors and started hiding them things under the carpet people starting hacking things together to make the numbers appear like they worked which created a whole load of other errors
None of this proves that you’ve got Zombie Subscribers.
Customers and employees might have found what they need in your services, products, interactions, and experiences (SPIES) For me, the useful thing is to look out for a change in someone’s previous good behaviours, not whether they match our assumptions about what good or bad engagement looks like.
One of my best managers noticed what I’d stopped doing
I’ve experienced this myself, early in my career one of the best managers I ever had noticed the change before I even noticed it myself. I wasn’t performing badly or missing deadlines or telling everyone I was miserable. She just noticed that I stopped doing the things that created value for the business:
Challenging the status quo with good intentions
Questioning assumptions with deeper discovery
Sparking new ideation
For someone who works cuts across strategy, innovation and designing new services and experiences its safe to say thats an important part of the job
She noticed a good trait and behaviour had started to disappear, not that a bad one had appeared. This I guess what made her such a good manager. She wasn’t waiting for some big, dramatic announcement that something was wrong. She was just really good at noticing early changes.
This is why I’m kind of a little bit sceptical of when managers turn around and say, “Hey, listen, my door is always open.” That’s great, but you’re ultimately relying on the fact that someone will come in, recognise that something has changed in themselves, and feel comfortable enough to raise it with you and tell you that. In my experience leading teams from 3 to 46, that is almost never the case
When employees stop speaking up, customers can feel it
This is why, throughout a lot of my career, I’ve always focused on connecting EX and CX together
Imagine a hotel where employees have repeatedly raised concerns about a terrible check-in process. They’ve explained time and time again what’s going wrong, suggested improvements, and shared what the customers are telling them, and then nothing changes
Over time, the employees just stop raising it. They concentrate on hacking the system to get the customer through the process rather than trying to improve it and go home exhausted, not realising how they are now part of the process of driving an inconsistent experience.
From a customer’s point of view perhaps they will deal with the poor experience for a while and still continue to make a few repeat bookings because the location might be convenient. Yet similar to my NatWest example, they will start to look elsewhere, stop recommending it, and quietly but surely they will one day not show up.
From a business point of view there now losing on both sides of the coin
Employees havent necessarily left but they have stopped contributing and sharing any new insights to improve the experience.
Customers havent necessarily left but they have become less willing to choose you, recommend you, and ultimately go to your competitor.
This is the reason why EX and CX need to be part of the same function. You have to ask yourself what happens to customer experience when the people who are responsible for improving it and making it awesome, stop believing that they can make a difference
What have people stopped doing that we haven’t noticed?
The reality is NatWest still had me as a paying customer, on their dashboards or whatever, I’m sure the story told them that everything was going good. But its the same story the hotel tells itself about still having bookings, or the one organisation tells itself about employees who are still turning up for work.
The number aren’t wrong the story we are telling ourselves might be
This is the reason why I think, if you’re a senior leader designing any form of experience or service for your customer or employees it pays more value to invest your attention in what’s disappearing, not necessarily what’s appearing
Are customers and employees still recommending you.
Are they still exploring new offers you put to them
Are people finding workarounds for friction you’ve stopped hearing about
Are you still getting new insights, suggestions and ideas from employees on how to level up the experience
None of these prove that you have a Zombie Subscriber problem, but it is worth paying a bit more attention to and investigating them. If there’s one question I think every CX and EX leader should take back to their team and ask its
What have people stopped doing that we haven’t noticed.
Then to find out why, go and speak to people (your customers and employees). Observe what’s happening. Look for situations where contribution, choosing, challenge, or speaking up has become too difficult to do, unrewarding, or simply no longer worth the effort.
The goal isn’t to force a Zombie Subscriber back to life or to identify them and remove them from the business.
It’s about recognising where the relationship you’re measuring is no longer an equal exchange in value between you and the customers or employees and trying to proactively get ahead of that, because people dont instantly becomes Zombie Subscriber overnight. Often its when they stay exactly where they are while the relationship disappears
Side note: Monzo Max is a great example of value proposition design and being close to your customers unmet wants and needs