The Love Call

Ask your sales team a simple question. When did one of them last call a customer without trying to sell something? No renewal to push through. No upsell to slip in. No link to a satisfaction survey at the end. Just a call to say: we just wanted to hear how things are going, and whether there is anything we should know.

Some call it a love call. A call where the only purpose is genuine interest in the customer. For most companies, the honest answer is that it never happens. And that quietly costs more revenue than almost any pricing decision your management will make this year.

When did you last contact a customer without wanting something?

Look at how your customer relationships actually work once the contract is signed. The invoice goes out on time. The renewal reminder arrives as planned. The cross-selling campaign lands the moment a contract expires. Every single touch point is designed to extract value from the customer.

Now look for the touch points designed to give value back without asking for anything in return. In most organisations, there are almost none. You measure loyalty with NPS and satisfaction scores. But your behaviour teaches customers that they only matter when the contract is up for renewal. Customers remember what you do, not what your customer promises say.

And this should make every CFO take notice:

You cannot expect a customer to be loyal to you until you have proven that you are loyal to the customer!

Loyalty is a behaviour, and behaviour responds to behaviour. If every interaction you initiate is about asking the customer for more, you have trained your customers to treat you as a supplier, not a partner. And suppliers get replaced the moment a cheaper alternative comes along.

The economics of a love call

This is where it stops being a soft idea and becomes a number. Imagine a customer base segmented by loyalty behaviour into three groups. The ambassadors, who buy more, stay longer and recommend you to others. The neutral customers, who buy what they usually buy, but no more, and who are ready to leave the moment a competitor calls. And the critics, who are already on their way out.

The group that can cost you the most is the neutral customers, because they are the largest group and the easiest to lose. These customers are not dissatisfied. They are simply overlooked. Taken for granted. And that is exactly the opening a competitor needs to win them over. A love call, genuine contact with no agenda, costs you a few minutes of one salesperson’s time. What the call protects can be an entire customer’s revenue.

Do the maths using your own figures. Take the average annual value of one neutral customer. Multiply it by the number of customers one salesperson could realistically call in a quarter. Then work out what the calls cost in sales time, and ask what share of customers you need to move from neutral to loyal before the calls have paid for themselves. The answer is usually a fraction of a percent! You will not find that kind of return anywhere else in the P&L for so little effort. This is Loyalty Economics in its simplest form: a small, deliberate action set against the revenue it protects.

Why nobody calls

If it is so cheap and so effective, why are love calls so rare? Not because sales teams are lazy. The system they work in rewards closed deals and a full pipeline, but it measures none of the value in a customer relationship that simply works. A salesperson who spends an afternoon on love calls has nothing to show on the dashboard that evening. So the call never gets made. The neutral customers drift away slowly and invisibly, until a large share of them disappear at once, and everyone asks what happened.

The solution is not a new platform or a multi-year transformation programme. It is a decision to treat love calls as important work that is worth measuring and worth rewarding. Give it a name. Measure it. Protect the time for it. It is a change your management can make next week, not in a year’s time.

You cannot ask for loyalty you have never shown

Before you invest in the next customer retention campaign or redesign the customer journey, look at the simplest lever you have. Call a customer for no other reason than the customer. A love call is one of the clearest loyalty signals you can send to your customers, and it costs almost nothing.