Before The Amazing Tech Giant Comes Knocking
This blog post extends thoughts shared in my previous blog post about a premier retail giant and its painfully convoluted process to get a piece of furniture repaired under a previously purchased warranty. It led me to think of the gaps in the consumer experience into which an amazing tech giant such as Amazon has so effectively, and seemingly inextricably, wedged itself.
There are a few things that the amazing retailing tech giant probably already knew going in, or learned along the way.
It is better to be remembered by a customer for every need in life than for a sporadic need they want fulfilled.
So long as the investors and capital markets allow a company to spoil the customer rotten like a grandfather spoils his grandkids without being accountable (for profits, in the retail context), every competing retailer becomes like the loving daughter who can only watch helplessly when her parents show up to spoil the grandkids rotten, handing them back to the mother once the sugar-high from all the candy kicks in, making grandpa their favorite person on earth.
Starting each day as if it is the first day of your business even though you are the strongest competitor forces you to keep fighting away the bureaucracy that tends to slow down processes in growing organizations.
What can a premier retailer do to insulate itself from the chills each time there’s a rumor that an amazing giant is going to enter their vertical?
When I think through the convoluted experience with the warranty process it becomes clear that
with each extra step in a retailer’s sale as well as post-sale processes, the wider the distance between a customer and the customer’s satisfaction, and greater the number of gaps available for the amazing giant to wedge itself anywhere along that process to steal the customer’s heart
a customer’s satisfaction in relation to a product or a retail brand needs to be perceived as the needs of a growing child that must be fed and nurtured regularly, long after the sale of the product and the warranty
when a customer has purchased a product, and taken it to her or his home, your company and brand has now become part of their familial experience, whether it be a sofa, an appliance or a pair of shoes that everyone admires at the Thanksgiving gathering
Every retail business would need to come up with its own shield to protect itself from such an amazing competitor’s impact. Here are some early thoughts.
Capture customer rapture: It would require a thoughtful review of the entire sale and post-sale process. Consider the possible times and places of every thought and interaction that your consumers and customers might have about your product or brand, and work backwards from that point to understand the easiest and simplest way to capture the emotion experienced in that thought or interaction to be able to swiftly convert it into rapture. The technology for that is becoming commonplace, flexible and inexpensive.
Reach for higher highs: Collapse all the steps between your customers and your grievance redressal mechanism to a single and swift action, while keeping your auditors and accountants happy. That allows you to keep elevating the customer’s rapture before it dips, apply a tourniquet and stop the bleeding as soon as your brand gets cut when a product fails, and use the opportunity to sell them something better.
Innovate and make your old products obsolete. To sell something better, you need to have something better. The instant feedback loop from your customers will allow you to become prescient and innovate better. Keeping customers in rapture through newer versions of the product will also shock-proof your retail business.
Process bloat is not easy to undo, but sometimes becoming the biggest loser (of bloat) is the only way to survive the threat of an amazingly beautiful competitor who is permanently squatting on your customers’ kitchen counters, heeding their every command until their hearts get stolen.
A life-long student of life in business, the author Ramesh Sambasivan, is also the principal at SiliconGlades, a design and innovation firm that helps enterprises (B2B and B2C), non-profit organizations and government agencies achieve desired outcomes through innovative marketing programs permeating the organization, with an eye on social impact.