Customer loyalty, tolerance and contempt

It continually amazes me how much self-delusion I hear from operators and their vendors on the topic of "customer loyalty". Many seem to confuse inertia (ie people being too lazy to switch) with loyalty. Or they confuse services which they describe as "sticky" (ie which have inherent user lock-in) as having the potential for creating loyalty.

They should have a look in a dictionary: "A feeling or attitude of devoted attachment and affection"

This fits rather uneasily with the reality of customers being treated with contempt over things like ludicrous data roaming fees, or (if the hype is to be believed) future attempts at extortion by non-portable network-resident address books.

Roaming fees are a particularly good example: do you really, really expect your customers to respect you and "be loyal" ("feel affection") when they are so clearly and evidently ripped off, often by factors of 100 or 1000 over reasonable prices? The two concepts - contempt and loyalty - are mutually-incompatible, and yet somehow marketing and pricing executives seem happy to overlook the link between the two.

I know very few customers who are truly "loyal" - in the sense that the extol the virtues of a given operator to friends, much less who would self-describe as "devoted" in the same fashion as a footbal fan or an Apple acolyte. Most are, at best, "tolerant" of their provider.