Customer experience
A few years before, the VHS and DVD renting giant Blockbuster ran out of business, and the company ran a study on customer experience in their stores. The results were beautiful, and most respondents liked the overall experience. These exciting results mainly were connected to the fact that customers have a chance to see and chat with their neighbours and read cases of DVDs, but why focus on details, am I right? If something is running smoothly, there is no need to change things, am I right?
Meanwhile, a small startup called Netflix was slowly gaining its first users. Their unique selling value was simple yet strong – laying naked in the bed, eating pizza and consuming almost infinite content piece by piece. “Surprisingly”, this has turned out to be the winning formula. Now think about that: you have a strong brand, customers, content, and most importantly, resources, and despite all that, you choose to put yourself in the role of follower. I understand that there might be other hundreds of internal reasons why Blockbuster decided to wait, but none of them matters now, does it?
Power of platforms
Netflix is just one of many stories where well-settled businesses missed their time to engage with a new platform. The most remarkable example of all time is Amazon. Imagine that you are entering the most competitive market of all. The demand belongs to actual business giants. Your presence, however, is more or less invisible since your whole focus is placed on this new platform where only a fraction of customers actively operate and buy stuff. A few years later, you are the primary threat to those same giants who ignored you. There is no doubt that Jeff Bezos’ Amazon did 1001 other things right but let us not forget, it all started with a bet on the right horse – the right platform that offers a superior experience. He was looking in the right direction at the time; everyone was looking elsewhere. One of the very basic marketing rules teaches us that it is vital to focus on a small segment with growing potential. Another tells us that superior customer experience always wins, yet companies consciously and unconsciously decide to stay ignorant …
Being in Virtual Reality for a while, I’m starting to experience a dejavú. The new platform that is being ignored by the majority of big players is slowly attracting its first users. There are thousands of other reasons that support not exploring this space. There are not enough active users, people will never buy staff through VR, and there is no clear ROI. Isn’t all of that a bit familiar to you? Online will never dominate, customers will never want to pay online, customers will … We all have our beliefs. Like Jeff Bezos, we are betting on different horses in this never-ending business race.
Ask differently, and think in the long term.
To find the correct answer, you need to ask the right questions. I genuinely believe that the biggest mistake of all these major players can be narrowed down to 2 things: wrong questions and short-term thinking. The standard questions manager with assigned KPIs asks: What will it bring right now? How much closer do I get to accomplishing my monthly/yearly KPIs? What is the ROI? Instead of asking; what we can lose if our competitors invest in this and we don’t? What will this step mean for us in 3-5 years? Where we will interact with our customers in the future and what we need to know to prepare for that … You see, most companies tend to judge investment decisions about innovation in terms of their short-term gain. Yet, the true disruption might be just behind the horizon of yearly KPIs.
Thanks to our recent journey with Yord, I’m in a very biased position to tell what the winning horse in the next primary race will be, and the truth is, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that we have a new platform that offers an immersive and superior experience we have never witnessed before. It’s only up to you which direction you decide to look but remember, the best experience always wins (in every reality)…
