Hippie CEO Life #09 - Dark Patterns
June 10, 2022
“Thank you for calling the account protection department……….your estimated wait time is 2 hours and 37 minutes. We appreciate your patience.”
As a company, one of the things that most of our clients ask us about is customer retention. As a company, one of the things that we focus on the most is customer retention.
The ability to retain and grow existing customers is critical to the health of any business, especially a boutique services company. The costs associated with adding a new customer are astronomically high, so in order to break even and start making a profit, customer retention becomes critical.
Not only is customer retention critical, it is far more cost effective to retain and grow existing customers than it is to add new customers. Most businesses understand this BUT not all businesses are in agreement on how to make that happen.
As a business owner myself, i’d like to think that other business owners set out to build a company around a product or service that they are passionate about, a product they believe deeply in, a product that they truly believe provides incredible value to the customer.
i really want to believe this, and maybe at some point in every business this was true, but from nearly 20 years of analyzing businesses, the data suggests that for many businesses, customer retainer is often viewed not from the lens of providing a quality product but from the lens of deliberate deceit.
When companies reach a place where they lack trust in the value of their product, they use what business strategists may refer to as Asymmetry or if you are reading an article about the topic, it probably mentions “Dark Patterns.”
The term “Dark Patterns” refers to deliberate design decisions that are aimed at subverting consumer choice (we see this a lot in subscription and services based businesses), in a way that makes signing up easy but stopping recurring charges is made incredibly difficult.
“You can check in…..but you can never check out!!!”
Historically, gyms have been very aggressive in using dark patterns in order to remain profitable. The business model is such that they make their services appear very attractive, pressure (often very young adults) into signing longterm contracts that they don’t understand, and then making it incredibly difficult to cancel or not renew the contract. It doesn’t really matter if the person ever comes into the gym, in fact it’s more profitable for the gym owners if they never show up. This is a classic dark pattern.
But gyms are just the tip of the preverbal iceberg, just look around at any of the number of subscriptions that you are tied into? Ever try to cancel one? Subscription based businesses are notorious for using dark patterns to retain customers. For example, there is a very popular satellite radio company that often comes pre-installed in new cars with an easy to use, free trial. A click here, a touch there, and you have hundreds of radio channels at your fingertips.
Oh….you don’t want to pay the reoccurring monthly bill anymore? It’s not just a click here, a touch there, it’s a try to find some hidden link in 6pt font, on some random web page, that after 18 clicks, you land on a page that provides an 800 number that you need to call if you want to cancel your subscription. And then, and by the way congratulations for waiting on hold for nearly an hour to talk to a human so you could cancel your subscription, you have the honor of being berated and beaten up by a customer retention specialist who is paid a commission for every customer they stop from cancelling their subscription. Gross.
Do dark patterns work? 100%, it is a proven strategy for retaining customers and we have the data to back that up. HOWEVER, just because somethings “works” doesn’t mean it is ethical or should be viewed as a sustainable business practice. In time, these deliberate efforts to deceive customers chips away at the brand value every company that deploys these techniques. The business owners may be off enjoying the rockstar life while kite skiing in the Maldives but they would have left behind a trail of broken promises and destruction and horrible experiences for their customers and employees.
Have you been the victim of dark patterns? Have you worked in businesses were dark patterns where deployed?
