True Loyalty: The Best Last Experience Is Your Next Minimum Expectation
How Does an Organization Create True Customer Loyalty?
Issue 219, July 3, 2025
Sam Walton said, “Your best last experience is your next minimum expectation.” In 2025, these words of wisdom have become a double-edged sword as the greatest opportunity and biggest threat to customer loyalty. Based on Walmart’s longevity and performance, his motto seems to be proving out in the retail marketplace. But Walton’s business philosophy works both ways. Your worst last experience creates your next maximum set of expectations. That is if you haven’t already lost the customer.
In our hyperconnected marketplace where consumers face a mind-numbing paradox of choice, many are turning their backs on their trust in brands. In 2022, we wrote about the overabundance of choice, our limited attention span and time, and our inherent inability to make choices when more than three options face us.
Three years later, the situation has only intensified. For B2B organizations, the temptation to add something shiny and new instead of addressing the core problem of loyalty has become an ingrained business strategy. So, the question stands: How do you make your customers loyal? How do you rise above the noise of the plethora of choices and compete with others offering similar alternatives? How do you leverage customers’ intention to engage with you and have them align with your offerings, brand, and organization?
The answer lies in a fundamental shift from one-way value delivery to a two-way partnership. At 2040, the most powerful invitation we offer our clients is simple: “Help us, help you.” This four-word strategy transforms relationships from transactional exchanges into collaborative partnerships where both parties invest in mutual success.
The Loyalty Crisis: A Shift from Devotion to Transaction
The marketplace has fueled the desire for more and more options. We are still barraged by as much choice as we were in 2022. With the abundance of choice promoted by an abundance of organizations across a sea of niche and mass brands, all seeking the crown jewel of recurring revenue, customer relationships have become increasingly transactional.
How many new styles of jeans, inventive cronuts, and an ever-expanding inventory of video, audio, and ebook content can we consume in one lifetime? How many subscriptions, memberships, and services can we manage when the hours in our day are finite?
Authentic loyalty above all needs to be earned. It’s not a marketing ploy or unverified claim, nor is it a gift from customers. To make things more complicated, loyalty is defined in the eyes of the beholder. What makes one customer devoted to a brand could be the exact thing that turns another customer off. Somehow, many organizations have forgotten the necessity to deeply understand their stakeholders, respect the relationship they have developed with them, and honor the responsibility to serve them.
A relationship is a two-way street, including a relationship between an individual and an organization. In a digital marketplace, it is possible—even imperative—to customize experiences, products, and services for each customer and ensure high-quality service as part of the total package. However, this bespoke strategy needs to be part of a larger framework that engenders loyalty. At the heart of this framework is the “help us, help you” philosophy—the recognition that lasting loyalty emerges from relationships where customers feel genuinely partnered with, not sold to. Asking high-gain questions works well because people inherently want to help others when asked genuinely. They appreciate organizations that care enough to ask.
Four macro-operating principles set the scene for creating loyal stakeholders based on this philosophy.
Positive Experiences
When an organization seeks to fix a function or department to improve the customer experience and ignores that change across the entire system, one element of the relationship is fixed while other parts remain broken, compromising customer loyalty. Customers expect consistent quality and value for their investment. High-quality products and services are the basics. Friendly, helpful, and efficient service at every touchpoint builds loyalty.
Here’s where “help us, help you” can transform the dynamic: Instead of assuming what customers need, successful organizations ask customers to share insights about their goals and challenges. This might mean asking, “Help us understand your workflow so we can configure this solution to save you the most time.” Or “Help us know your priorities so we can customize your experience accordingly.” Customizing interactions and offers based on individual customer preferences shows that organizations care about their stakeholders. Ultimately, a positive experience starts with making it simple for customers to find information, make purchases, and resolve issues.
Trust
Transparency is one of today’s top mandates. Honest and open communication about products, services, and policies is key. The “help us, help you” approach builds trust by positioning the organization as a partner seeking mutual success rather than a supplier pushing products. When you say, “Help us understand your current pain points so we can better serve you,” you’re demonstrating that their success is your priority. Building authentic relationships with customers on a personal level demonstrates genuine care, and delivering on promises ensures meeting customer expectations and fulfilling commitments. Some organizations become so focused on the “sale” and resulting revenue gain in the short term that the concept of trust built over time across the experience becomes a second thought.
Emotional Connections
Feeling valued and appreciated is a basic emotion. Customers who feel recognized and respected are more likely to develop an emotional attachment to an organization. Loyalty is reinforced by shared values when a customer identifies with an organization’s values and beliefs. A sense of belonging is built by creating an authentic affinity community. Consider simple tactics like a personal welcome with each interaction; it is often the little things that contribute to and build the emotional connection to a brand, organization, and its products and services.
Engagement
In a time-pressed society with far too many choices, it’s easy for any relationship to become transactional and limited by lack of awareness and knowledge. The transactional relationship focused on only one product or service leaves much on the table. What is left out can be the substance that actually builds a long-term relationship and the resulting loyalty.
This is where the “help us, help you” strategy becomes most powerful. True relationship-based engagement comes by offering help, sharing information, promoting ways to use a product, and equating those to real-life situations. At the same time, it also means actively seeking customers’ input to improve the relationship.
How to Build an Innovative Loyalty Program
Retailers have become sophisticated about building loyalty programs with customers, offering incentives to satisfy customers and retain them. Who wouldn’t want a complimentary Sephora birthday gift or Gap cash for the next purchase? Amazon Prime members get deferential perks. Airlines, hotels, and restaurants have had loyalty programs offering members rewards for decades. These programs have become incredibly popular. Chase Sapphire has raised its card fee and American Express plans on raising its card fee next year, however cardholders continue to pay the increased fees because they believe the value they gain from benefits is well worth the expense.
Most B2B organizations do not have sophisticated loyalty programs. In working with many associations over the years, we ask them what benefits they offer their members. We often hear the same answer: discounts. A discount is a valuable savings, but it is a transaction, not a relationship. In other words, transactions alone are not the key to building loyalty.
The Gamification Opportunity
The concept of gamification plays well in building a loyalty program. Everyone loves a challenge, to be a winner, recognized for a contribution, and get a prize. So, what if individual members of an association were part of a loyalty program that awarded points for each of their interactions with the organization? What if media companies offered subscribers a series of tiered incentives based on their engagement with the brand’s content? What if B2B organizations viewed their customers as members of a professional club, not commodified readers or customers?
The core philosophy of this approach is to treat professionals not as users or subscribers—but as valued members of a curated, customized mutually beneficial professional ecosystem. This is “help us, help you” in practice: Reward engagement across touchpoints to reinforce long-term affinity and deepen both community and revenue while gathering insights that help you serve them better. For example, when members complete surveys or provide feedback, they’re not just helping you—they’re earning points toward rewards while contributing to improvements that benefit the entire community.
Here’s a quick rundown of actions that could feed into such a loyalty program:
Engagement Activities
Attending a webinar and/or event
Publishing a thought leadership article
Volunteering as a participant or reviewer
Publishing a question or responding to questions in a community
Sharing content on LinkedIn with a branded hashtag
Commenting or asking questions in a live session
Opening and reading an email newsletter
Completing a survey or poll
Being featured in media content (podcast/interview)
Potential Rewards
Discounted or free registration to flagship events
Gift cards, book bundles, or tools relevant to the industry
Exclusive member swag
Early access to trend reports or research
1:1 industry briefing session with expert leaders
Private roundtable invites or networking dinners
Spotlight features in newsletters or social media
Make It Sustainable: Manage Expectations
Essentially, the expertise level of customer service has to match the expectations of the customer. Negative experiences lead to destroying loyalty, not just setting it back. Think about the many ways organizations sabotage their customer loyalty.
Not Connecting the Dots: You have purchased a product or service or registered for an event. Why do you continue to receive waves of emails urging you to buy or register when you already have?
Hello? You are trying to negotiate with customer service which is either a dysfunctional chatbot or a human being in a call center that does not speak your language fluently nor are they trained in solving your issue. Or even worse, when attempting to reach customer service by phone, you are put into endless loops of mechanical prompts that ultimately disconnect your call.
Tempus Fugit: You are trying to receive critical customer service when organizations have limited support hours—closed after 5:00 PM or on weekends.
Engagement with Context
Smart organizations seeking to build loyalty realize this cannot be done in a vacuum. Understanding stakeholders is the foundation for building solid holistic experiences that result in engagement and beget loyalty. The “help us, help you” philosophy transforms how organizations approach feedback collection. Rather than sending generic surveys that feel like homework, successful organizations frame feedback requests as partnership opportunities. Here’s a traditional approach: “Please complete this customer satisfaction survey.” Contrast that with the “help us, help you” approach: “Help us understand what’s working well and what isn’t, so we can improve your experience and others like you.”
Seeking feedback becomes step one in building a partnership. Actively solicit customer feedback through surveys, reviews, and other channels, but position it as mutually beneficial: their input helps you serve them better, and their willingness to help demonstrates their investment in the relationship. Ensure there is an appropriate response to the provided feedback. Take customer input seriously and ensure it infuses changes. Ensure the changes are felt and known by the customers—and explicitly connect improvements back to their input: “Based on feedback from members like you, we’ve streamlined our onboarding process.” This completes the “help us, help you” loop by showing that their help actually helped.
No organization can change or transform itself overnight. We all have to commit and work on our relationships, which are inherently works in progress. Demonstrate iterative continuous improvement to reflect customer feedback to improve products, services, and overall customer experience. Your commitment to the partnership mindset and working on the relationship by delivering high-quality value helps build long-term loyalty.
The New Loyalty Imperative
Sam Walton’s insight remains prophetic: your last interaction sets tomorrow’s expectations. But in 2025, the stakes are higher. With infinite choice and zero penalty to switching allegiances, loyalty isn’t just about meeting expectations—it’s about creating experiences so valuable that customers can’t imagine going elsewhere.
The organizations winning at loyalty share three characteristics:
They obsess over individual value creation rather than broad market segments.
They treat relationships as investments with measurable returns through programs that reward engagement, not just purchases.
They embrace the “help us, help you” philosophy as their operating system, recognizing that loyalty is built through partnership, not transactions.
Understanding the value of loyalty means approaching it with authenticity. The “help us, help you” mindset ensures that you’re actively engaging stakeholders with meaningful, customized experiences and rewards for their commitment and engagement. Without this collaborative approach, you risk embodying another of Sam Walton’s insights: “Loyalty is the absence of something better.”
The Bottom Line
In a world where customers have infinite alternatives, your job isn’t to capture them—it’s to become so indispensable that they can’t imagine a better alternative exists. This requires moving beyond transactional relationships to creating genuine partnerships where both parties invest in mutual success through the simple but powerful practice of asking customers to help you help them. The race isn’t to the bottom on price or product features. It’s a race to the top of relevance, value, and authentic relationship building. Start with “help us, help you,” and loyalty will follow.
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