Customers are our best loyalty teachers. And the lessons gleaned from ‘problem’ customers are often rich and long lasting. Consider these less-than-ideal customer types and some of the loyalty-making insights they provide.

 Rules Breakers: Keep an eye on them Consider the case of a home shopping channel, which religiously applied the industry’s RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) model for scoring customer-buying behavior. A long-time customer had graduated into buying roughly a $1000 a month in merchandise and was now dubbed a “top customer” per the RFM model. Her stair-stepped purchasing trend was exactly what the company strived for. But, six months later the bloom was off the rose. When the customer’s revenue data and returns data (which were stored in different databases) were matched, a surprising finding was revealed: Her returns were sky high. Digging deeper, the company was shocked to discover the customer owned a small gift shop and was using the shopping channel’s merchandise on a consignment-type basis while carefully complying with the company’s 60 day return policy. Sadly, the company’s data silos masked this thought-to-be top customer’s true value for too many months.