Customer experience is one of the things which
is keeping C suite executives awake in the night. As a result a we see slew of
initiatives implemented by various organizations in the hope of improving the
experience provided to the customer in every interaction. Significant
investments in technology and algorithms have been made and continued to be
made in order to understand customer & their needs to build a great
experience mechanism. Companies have used AI, Machine learning, IOT, Robotics
and a whole lot of analytics platforms to come out with such mechanisms which
will elevate customer interaction.
Some of the areas where companies have worked
are
· Proactively identify the product customer may
want to buy and build some special schemes around the same
· Reduce the price points and increase convenience
points through multiple aspects like efficient operations, Direct to customer, free
delivery, same day delivery, order online and pick up at the nearest store,
etc.
· Provide a significant choice to customer and
make return easy to reduce the hesitancy of impulse buying
· Use social media information and create a
product for specific groups and provide a special deals for specific group
·
Train the last mile employees to provide a
great experience at every touch point with customer
·
Creating a powerful online channel to help
customers buy from where ever and whenever they want to buy
All the efforts are towards making buying
process delightfully rewarding to customer that customer returns to buy more as
well as provides word of mouth publicity.
It is also important to note the temperament of
the current generation; they do not want to go out to stores to have a feel of
the product they want to buy but they are happy to order it from their mobile
phone. There is no loyalty for a seller/shop, who so ever provides lower price,
good return policy gets the deal. Although brand plays a role in decision
making but convenience and price determines the purchase decision.
Companies like Amazon, Walmart have leapfrogged
in this art and are creating more and more mechanisms to engage the buyer
meaningfully. I call these mechanisms as Gen
1 mechanisms which involve changing / optimizing/ improving everything
around the product. The next step in this would be to include product itself in
building the lasting customer experience.
The Gen2
of mechanisms will include the product and extreme personalization will be at
core. Simply put, enable customer to define /design product of their choice and
provide the delivery with the same efficiency and convenience we have built in
the Gen 1 mechanisms.
One example, in today’s situation, if one wants
to buy a Shirt , first you visit a website, you choose style followed by
selection of either color or pattern from the list available in the size
that fits you. Select delivery option and see the total price. Normally, person
will check on multiple websites if the same brand and similar shirt is
available on any other website and finalize the decision based on the best
pricing. The next generation of disruption is going to
come from extreme personalization i.e. by allowing customer to design
their product. If we translate this to purchase of shirt situation, then it
will be something like this – you visit a website for shirt, every one does not
have a great chiseled body and std sizes do not fit them properly so you
provide your photograph so that your measurements are understood by the
company. Then you can choose the cloth, pattern, etc. from a significantly
large repository of designs and cloths. The website provides you with the
picture of shirt with your specifications worn by you (using the photograph
provided by you). If you like it, you can place an order. It will be
manufactured to your specific size, design and shipped you efficiently. It is a
tailored shirt purchased with convenience of sitting at home and price of a
mass manufactured shirt and delivered to a destination of your choice.
It will be a 100% “made to order” scenario, but
a completely automated to remove any manual work typically involved in “made to
order” scenario. The technological development in terms of machine to machine
connectivity and various facets of automation will allow us to share the order
from a mobile phone to the shop floor which will manufacture the goods to the
specifications provided using the raw material for specific order and then it will
be shipped to specific address. This will create a significant impact on the
entire industry as companies will not have any stocks of finished goods, no
warehouses for finished goods, no worries as to how to take out the unsold
stock, etc. The warehouses will only hold stock of raw material and you will
have many automated specialized plants to manufacture specific category of
products connected with the websites picking up orders. With 3D printing
capabilities getting evolved, this can be enhanced significantly. It might look
impossible at this juncture as it will need to dismantle the whole industry and
rebuild it with new principles, but the competition will drive us to conquer this
new frontier of extreme personalization to create that super duper customer
experience.
