You finish what you came to do.
Then something appears.
- One more notification.
- One more recommendation.
- One more message.
- One more update.
- One more reason to come back.
None of these things necessarily seems significant on its own.
But together they reveal something important about many digital services:
The interaction is not always designed to end when our purpose has been fulfilled.
Sometimes the system has another objective.
It wants us to return.
When returning becomes the product
Every business wants customers to return.
There is nothing unusual about that.
- A restaurant wants repeat customers.
- A retailer wants people to shop again.
- A newspaper wants readers to return.
Traditionally, the mechanism for achieving that has been straightforward:
Create something worth returning to.
Digital technology introduced another possibility.
Systems can observe what brings people back.
- They can measure responses.
- They can test different prompts.
- They can adapt what is presented.
- And they can progressively optimise the experience around continued interaction.
The question therefore changes from:
How do we create something people want to return to?
to something subtly different:
How do we make people return?
That distinction matters.
When preference becomes a feedback loop
Imagine repeatedly interacting with a particular type of content.
A system notices.
So it presents more of it.
You interact again.
The system interprets that as confirmation.
It presents still more.
Over time, what began as a choice can become part of a reinforcing cycle.
The system observes behaviour and uses that behaviour to shape the environment in which the next behaviour occurs.
- Observe.
- Learn.
- Predict.
- Present.
- Measure.
- Repeat.
The individual is still making choices.
But the system is increasingly shaping the circumstances surrounding those choices.
What happens when the feedback loop cannot form?
This is where ICCA introduces a very different proposition.
If a provider cannot construct persistent behavioural continuity around an individual, it cannot continually refine the experience using that individual’s behavioural history.
The system cannot endlessly learn:
- This worked last time.
- This kept the person engaged.
- This brought the person back.
- Try more of it.
Removing the behavioural feedback loop therefore removes one of the mechanisms through which digital experiences can be progressively optimised around individuals.
That creates a very different relationship.
For a greenfield business
A new digital business can make an important decision before these mechanisms become embedded.
It can ask:
Why should customers return?
Because the service is useful?
Because the content is valuable?
Because there is something new to discover?
Because they genuinely want to?
Or because the system has become exceptionally effective at prompting their return?
Those are not equivalent business models.
One depends upon continually producing value.
The other can increasingly depend upon producing behaviour.
For existing organisations
For established organisations, the question is harder.
- Retention.
- Daily active use.
- Return frequency.
- Notifications.
- Engagement.
- Recommendation.
These may already form part of how digital performance is understood.
The challenge is therefore not simply to abandon engagement.
It is to understand what creates it.
Leaders can ask:
Are customers returning because we continue to create something they value?
Or:
Are we using what we know about their behaviour to make returning increasingly difficult to resist?
That boundary deserves attention.
This is not about blaming the individual
Discussions about compulsive digital use can easily become conversations about personal discipline.
- Turn off the notifications.
- Put the phone away.
- Set limits.
- Exercise more self-control.
But there is an asymmetry in that argument.
On one side is an individual.
On the other can be sophisticated technology capable of learning from behaviour and continually adjusting what is presented.
That makes compulsive use a leadership and design question as well as an individual one:
What responsibility does the organisation have for the behaviour its systems are deliberately optimised to produce?
Remove the incentive, change the experience
This connects directly with the broader ICCA principles of behavioural neutrality and human autonomy.
If the system cannot profit from progressively understanding an individual’s behaviour, there is less reason to create mechanisms designed around that understanding.
The product has to compete differently.
- Through usefulness.
- Quality.
- Relevance.
- Functionality.
- Trust.
Ultimately, through the value people receive from it.
The reason to return becomes the service, not the system’s ability to engineer the return.
A question for leaders
Look at the mechanisms designed to bring customers back to your digital services.
Then ask:
If we knew nothing about an individual’s previous behaviour, would this experience still be valuable enough for them to return?
If the answer is yes, you may have created genuine customer value.
If the answer is no, another question becomes necessary:
What exactly have we optimised?
That is the adoption question behind ICCA: Understanding and Avoiding Compulsive Use.
It does not argue that people should stop using technology.
It asks whether technology should be designed to make stopping unnecessarily difficult.
The underlying ICCA work is openly shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, encouraging discussion, challenge, adaptation and further development.
Perhaps the strongest customer relationship isn’t one where technology becomes exceptionally good at bringing people back. It is one where people come back because they genuinely choose to.
#ICCA #CompulsiveUse #DigitalWellbeing #HumanAutonomy #BehaviouralNeutrality #DigitalTrust #EthicalTechnology #CustomerExperience #Leadership #CreativeCommons
