You might think of Netflix as the dominant subscription video platform today, streaming thousands of titles to hundreds of millions of subscribers worldwide. But in the summer of 2011, Netflix made a decision that nearly unraveled its business.
The company split its DVD and streaming services and raised prices by 60% overnight. The price hike led to 800,000 subscriber losses in a single quarter, a 77% stock drop, and intense customer backlash. Netflix quickly became one of the ten most hated companies in America. The company was in a death spiral not because of competition or product quality. It was failing because it broke the value equation: customers no longer believed the value they received justified the cost they were being asked to bear. This is how value destruction begins. While the Netflix story comes from consumer tech, the same pattern plays out every day in B2B companies. It just happens more quietly.
Are you creating value or killing it?
Value is a measurable benefit or meaningful outcome for your customers and their users. Value is what customers believe, feel, and defend; not what companies claim. When companies break promises, then trust is destroyed faster than it is built. And recovery often requires years. The Netflix example is dramatic, but it illustrates how fragile value really is once trust breaks. Netflix’ massive bet on raising prices and moving their platform to streaming videos took over two years to fully recover from.
How companies quietly destroy customer value for their existing customers
Most companies do not set out to destroy value. They believe they are doing the right things. They invest in product development, hire more people, and add processes meant to support customers. Yet value rarely disappears in one dramatic moment. Value erodes quietly through well-intentioned decisions that increase effort, blur outcomes, and shift focus away from what customers are actually trying to achieve. When trust weakens, investment drops. When investment drops, value becomes harder to see, harder to defend, and easier to walk away from. What follows are the most common ways companies unintentionally undermine the very value they are working so hard to create.
- Feature fixation. One of the most common ways tech companies destroy value is by over focusing on features. Internally, features feel tangible and safe. Companies fixate on upcoming releases and product roadmaps, and chase requirements from a handful of key customers while alienating the rest. Yet, customers do not buy features; they buy progress. They buy movement toward a goal that matters to them. They buy results. When teams lead with functionality instead of impact, value becomes abstract and hard to defend. Feature lists grow longer, but the connection to customer outcomes gets weaker. Customers are left to figure out how to derive value from the features and this slows adoption, and increases friction, which slows value. When value is unclear, it becomes fragile.
- Customer onboarding. Onboarding is a common failure point. A health tech company I worked with occupied more than ten different roles to engage with customers during the onboarding phase alone. Although each person had good intentions, the result was confusion, delays, and frustration. More people do not equal more value. From the customer’s perspective, onboarding felt harder than it needed to be. When getting started requires excessive coordination and effort, early value erodes before it has a chance to take hold.
- Time and effort costs. Value additionally breaks down when the effort required from customers exceeds what they believe they are paying for. I spoke with a company whose customers regularly claimed their product saved them significant time. Yet those same customers complained that much of that freed time was spent in meetings with the company’s customer-facing teams. The promise and the reality were misaligned. Even when outcomes exist, perceived value collapses when customers feel the cost is higher than the benefit.
- Over communicating and selling. Communication is a fundamental area where good intentions backfire. Bombarding customers with emails, updates, webinars, and announcements creates noise, not value. What feels like engagement on the inside feels like interruption on the outside. When every message is framed as urgent or important, customers stop paying attention altogether. Plus, when marketing messages and sales motions continue long after the contract is signed, customers feel like transactions, not partners. Customers become aware of being pushed toward the company’s next target, not their next outcome. Over time, customers grasp that the relationship is one-directional and confidence weakens.
- Not articulating value. A further silent value killer is failing to demonstrate and articulate value. When customers cannot clearly see benefits, those benefits effectively do not exist. Value must be made visible. That means review meetings must explicitly tie outcomes to goals. Dashboards must show impact, not just activity, and reports should reinforce progress over time. This is especially critical for behind-the-scenes products like infrastructure, data platforms, or middleware, where value is indirect and easy to forget. It becomes a serious risk when a champion leaves and no one else can explain why your product matters. When renewal time arrives, you will find that “suddenly” there is no value story to defend.
- Poor experiences. Even when your product delivers results, the customer experience shapes how those results are remembered and evaluated. Not knowing how customers actually use the product or what they are trying to accomplish reduces customer trust, and ultimately, value. Interactions and recommendations feel generic and miss the mark. Not to mention friction in support, slow response times, unclear ownership, and inconsistent handoffs, which all create unnecessary effort. Value is not just what customers achieve; it is how hard they have to work to get there.
- Value cliffs. Finally, many companies treat value as a moment rather than a journey. They deliver a few early wins, declare success, and move on. Without continued reinforcement, customers hit what I call a value cliff. Momentum slows, adoption plateaus, and trust quietly erodes. When value is not reinforced, it decays.
None of these actions feel like value destruction in isolation. But together, they create a steady drain. Customers expend more effort, receive less clarity, and feel less understood. Trust erodes incrementally, not dramatically. Over time, value erodes as the result of small, repeated decisions that slowly work against the customer.
You cannot afford to lose trust from existing customers
Left unattended, value does not stay neutral. It either grows or it shrinks. In the book, What a Unicorn Knows, How Leading Entrepreneurs Use Lean Principles to Drive Sustainable Growth, Matt May and Pablo Dominguez share:
“Unnecessary friction stems from an inward, self-centered view of the business organized around its own ideas and interests. You must center your business and every team around customer-centered value.”
When companies fail to deliver and reinforce value, they do more than lose accounts. They weaken relationships, erode trust, stall growth, and create inefficiencies across the business.
Value drives decisions. Value generates retention, loyalty, and expansion. Value fuels revenue growth and operational efficiency. This is why value must be designed, delivered, and reinforced deliberately. It is not enough to build a strong product or to close a deal. Value lives in the day-to-day experience of using your product, working with your organization, and seeing progress toward meaningful outcomes.
So, the real question is simple: are you intentionally creating value, or are you unintentionally killing it? The answer determines your company’s future growth long before churn ever shows up on a dashboard.
DONNA WEBER is a globally recognized customer value and onboarding expert with a decades-long track record of success as a strategic consultant to high-growth companies. Renowned for her approach to turning customers into loyal champions, companies bring Donna in when they’re ready to level up by moving fast in the right direction. Her relentless focus on the customer helps them scale smarter by delivering on the lifetime value they promise from day one. Her bestselling book, Onboarding Matters, is considered a definitive guide to post-sale customer success. Learn more at donnaweber.com.
