To create superior Customer Experiences! At the end of the day, it is not about us, it is about the customer. Customers have the final decision to stay or leave. We need to be smart and find the ways to connect with our customers and to create the bond that will allow us to have customers for life.
In our previous article “Customer happiness or efficiency? Superior Customer Experience or lowering costs?”; we discussed about the different types of connected customer experiences.
Once you have an idea of the type of connected relationship you want to design for your customers, the question is how to implement this relationship in a cost-effective way: You need to create a connected delivery model. This model consists of three parts:
- Designing Connection Architectures – For example Uber has created connections between previously unconnected parties: Individuals with cars and individuals looking for a ride. When implementing a connected strategy, it is critical to identify how much of the customer experience your company will generate internally (Uber App) and how much will be delegated to other partners in the ecosystem (The drivers).
- Revenue models – You cannot only rely in traditional revenue models (Exchange of good or services for money!). There is more. For example, Disney, in its theme park division is still making most of its money from admission tickets, food, merchandise, and fees for special experiences inside the park, but they also have the annual pass, which you use it or not, it is a subscription-based model where revenue is collected monthly and charged directly to your credit card. Contrast with Niantic and Nintendo, two companies that also produce amazing experiences centered on fictitious characters. With Pokémon Go, the partners have leveraged augmented reality to create a technology platform that turns any place into a virtual theme park. You can play it anywhere, anytime, and you can play it for free, together with its other millions of active users. Niantic creates revenues through in-app purchases that enhance or upgrade the game and through sponsorship by firms that create desirable locations for the game, like Starbucks or McDonalds.
- Technology Infrastructure – Technology advances are often what make connected strategies economically feasible. Of course, everyone would like to have personalized, on-demand services that fulfill the most fundamental needs. But how can companies offer such customized services at affordable prices? It depends on the connected relationships that we previously discussed.
In summary, a company’s connected strategy is a set of operational and technological choices the fundamentally changes:
- How the company connects to it customers by implementing a customer journey that transforms episodic interactions into continuous relationships with low frictions and high degree of communication.
- The connections the company creates between the various players in its ecosystem through the type of connection architecture it chooses, and the money it generates through a revenue model (For example, Uber: Customer pays Uber directly, and Uber pays the driver; Uber charges, the driver provides the service to the end customer. Through the Client-Uber-Driver-Client connection).
Whether you are a start-up trying to disrupt an existing industry, or an incumbent company that wants to revitalize its strategy and defend its business, whether you deal directly with end customers, or are in a B2B setting; only by delivering customer experiences that are really valuable to them, you will be able to retain and attract customers and to create a sustainable business success.
