We all complain about our "bad customers". Yes, you can admit it... it is true. Some of them can be quite a pain in the --- unbridled expectations department. However, we fail to understand that just like kids/teens pre-adults (as the father of two amazing daughters 15 and 18, I can attest to this), they are not born that way: we made them.
Prepping for this article, I decided to do a little research on what's out there about the topic. I found a handful of articles from the early 2010s through today -- some of them very good, some of them interesting. A few analyst reports but nothing earth-shattering because they focus on the same thing: how do organizations shift their content strategies or marketing campaigns from distribution to "education" (a distribution with fancier words), but none really focused on a different approach.
The problem is not what you call the targeting-attraction-capturing stages of customer acquisition; the problem is how you do it. This is not about your company needs; this is about understanding consumers and their expectations, meeting them, and letting them become customers on their own.
You have bad habits and bad processes around your need to sell your product above everything else. Consumers and your customers are only trying to a) get what they need, even if it necessitates some "whining", or b) survive your inane approach to customers lifecycle.
If you were to separate your processes along expected outcomes to spot, attract, and capture consumers, and engage them as customers - just like good kids who graduate high school (my daughter just did, very proud of her considering the damage done by COVID-19[1] and bad educators along the way -- but I digress) and set their path in life