The word revolution is overused, but in the past five odd
years, there has been a significant one. A technology revolution that has
empowered customers and impacted the way they engage with products and service
providers. Thanks to a combination of technologies, the Customer of 2015 is
vastly different from 2010.
The Encyclopedia Effect: The Customer Knows More
When a customer walks into either a retail or an online
store today, the smart money is on the probability that he or she knows more
about the product than the available product literature. Apart from high
turnaround and relative inexperience of store staff, the major factor that has
exacerbated this trend is on-demand information. Customers today have all the
means to learn and thoroughly research their purchase in terms of features,
price comparisons, technologies, accessories, and performance. Contributing to this is the ease of garnering
information via social media. For example, just observe the amount of
information provided by Amazon for any product, and the information posted by
the users in the reviews section.
How ready is a business to deal with this customer? When
Customers are empowered with on-demand information, why are businesses still
stuck with outdated information?
You the Customer vs. You the Business Decision-maker
You, as the customer, carry information on the go. You
have Wikipedia, Amazon, Google, and every possible product database in your
pocket. But as the enterprise decision-maker, you probably have only one source
of information and can rarely combine information from other data sources. Have
you ever taken a print out of a product brochure to a retail store to make a
purchase? But in your office, you do print BI reports before taking them to
meetings. Even if the report is not printed, just the mere fact that it is a
‘report’, makes it already outdated by the time it got saved as a file! Do you
see the contrast? You as the customer are empowered with on-demand information,
but as a business decision-maker, you are restricted and forced to depend on
outdated information for important decision-making. Remember that your business
is facing customers armed with information on the go!
Are you making it easier for yourself to find that
information? Are you enabling or constricting this behavior? Does your sales
process factor in the always addressable customer?
The Real-time Effect: The decision making cycles in
seconds
Back then about 5 years ago, you heard a song, you tried
to find out what it was, and maybe you heard it again, then on the radio.
Somebody told you what the song was if you were able to hum it. Or you searched
the lyrics on the internet. You went to the music store or Amazon, and bought
the CD, at whatever the arbitrary price point for the CD was.
Now you hear and like a song that you've never heard
before, you "Shazam" it, and it tells you the song and artist, and
offers you the chance to buy it with a single click off iTunes. In 30 seconds,
from never having heard the song, you now own it.
This telescoping marketing and sales cycle is what the
mobile world is accelerating. Real time is in. Waiting is out. Customers are
starting to expect this in more and more areas. Whether it’s your bank account
or your energy bill, or an itemized break up of your estimate for fitting out a
new nursery, there is an increased expectation to make it available now. How
real time is your business? How long do your customers have to wait for
information about your products and services? How much self-service do you
enable in the information buffet?
The journey isn’t over yet, but not recognizing and adapting
to these changes already could mean that you are out of step with the customer
of today.
