The Opportunity for Business is the Customer Inexperience

The reason businesses are in business is to serve customers. "There are many opportunities for businesses to help customers free up time to get things done."

By looking at the customer process from outside-in, business can create both new opportunities, improvements and innovations. In delivering on the customers expectation, a business will position itself ahead of its competition, providing it with an overall strategy that will allow it to ultimately be successful.

See http://bit.ly/30laE

Apple iPod

It is interesting that throughout history, there are many examples of where the first person or company that created something new were not able to capitalise on the first mover advantage and nothing is more true than in the MP3 market. At the time the iPod came out, there were a lot of MP3 devices already in the market. So what made the iPod the defacto standard?

First of all, marketing helps and when gadgets look cool, then people are drawn to them. Comparing the iPod to the generic USB-looking MP3 devices around at the time there was no comparison, the iPod won hands down.

Next is the interface, the early MP3 players either had an LCD screen, the later ones had a colour screen but really did not take full advantage of it. The iPod on the other hand displays song information and provides album covers and cover flow, which is a nice touch and ads to the user experience.

Next, user interaction - click buttons versus click wheel. This innovation made it easy for users to scroll through large songs lists and immediately raised the customer expectation. Once you've used it you'll never go back.

Finally, the complete end-to-end experience. For acquiring MP3 files, generic MP3 manufacturers leveraged off third party systems such as Windows Media Player. This proved to be problematic. Any problems users experienced due to software updates, upgrades, software errors, connection problems and so on were not considered to be the fault of the MP3 manufacturer, nor did Microsoft take any responsibility for the problems because it was associated with a third party device. No-one owned the user experience. Apple looked at the user experience from end-to-end and their response was to provide iTunes, an application which made it easy to acquire songs on iPods and other Apple devies.

Now the Apple iPod, iTouch and iPhone have become the defacto standard as mobile entertainment platforms and they have helped make Apple one of the most successful technology companies of the 21st century. Apple is defintely a good example of an outside-in company and this year, Apple was named 6th in the Millward Brown Optimor TOP 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2009.

Why customers may never become customers again

Where there is so much competition around, you have to earn a customer's loyalty and that means providing "great products at the right price and backing it up with great service". Shouldn't all customers deserve this quality, not just new customers but even customers that have already been loyal. If it really is better to save an existing customer than to find a new one, why do companies not look after their loyal customers better? Is it because they have already given enough of their money that they have already become profitable? Is it because companies have customer aquisition strategies in place but do not have similar strategies in place to keep customers?

In another example of where every customer interaction is a moment of truth, if a company makes it easy for a customer to leave then the customer may come back in time. Make it difficult, and the customer may never return.

See http://bit.ly/7ixuK

How company's waste money

Here is a great blog post from The Process Ninja about Fantastic Furniture. This post highlights the importance of process and what can happen when processes are not in place. This classic example highlights how every customer interaction is a Moment of Truth and every MOT creates work.

See http://bit.ly/TlN1Q

Example of Inside-out (United Airlines) v Outside-In (Southwest)

Here is a great example of how looking outside in, delivering upon successful customer outcomes can provide long term business success. The comparison is made over a decade and makes for an interesting comparison. So does Outside-In really make a difference?

See http://bit.ly/gw5fC

Who are the customers of government?

A very relevant article on the importance of knowing who the customer is and delivering to the customers expectation in the public service. Unfortunately this ideology appears to be lost to both the Australian federal government and NSW state government at the moment. So the question has to be asked, isn't the sole purpose of the government supposed to be to look after the will of the people?

http://bit.ly/IdoQr

British Airways asks staff to work unpaid for up to a month

Last month, British Airways posted a record annual loss of £400 million (US$656 million). Here is what contributed to this record loss:

• demand for the airline's passenger seats and cargo holds fell during the last financial year
• its fuel bill rocketed to almost £3 billion (US$4.7 billion)
• British Airways, like its premium-class competitors, is losing customers to cheaper rivals

So what has the airline decided to do?

The company has made a switch in strategy, trying to tempt passengers with lower fares, sacrificing profit per seat for "bums on seats." This idea is not new and comes from the budget airlines such as EasyJet, who know their customers and what they want. See http://bit.ly/pnQTr.

Interestingly that it should take a crisis such as this to force the company to provide its customers cheaper seats when this has been going on for some time now.

See here for the details of the crisis http://bit.ly/P90Nk

This strategy is unlikely to help significantly because the company is still looking at things from the inside out and it would take a complete re-evaluation of the company's focus, looking at things from outside in, to dig it out of this hole.