There is no secret sauce when attempting to offer a truly positive customer experience that will work for each brand equally. Only through analysing customer behaviour and executing carefully planned steps, can we bridge the gap between product focused and added value customer engagements.
So what does a positive customer experience look like? The trick is in understanding what your customer is trying to achieve and enhance their journey to support this goal. People don’t buy products. They buy convenience, entertainment, self-confidence or even status. In other words they buy products to address a very specific need.
A great embodiment of this customer centric approach is the concept of ‘everything as a service’ (EaaS or XaaS). Rather than simply selling a product, a company removes all of the hassle linked to the ownership of the product and for a fixed retainer offers the product as a service. Most commonly known type of EaaS is ‘software as a service’ (SaaS). Office 360 offers their customers the whole MS Office package in the cloud accessible through the web browser.
Customers no longer have to care about installing the software or doing upgrades. Everyone wins: MS has access to a wider range of customers and customers don’t have to worry about updates, upgrades or how it works. It simply works. It works so well that in fact Forrester estimates that consumer cloud services will be worth $12 billion by 2016. That is a whole industry built based on offering a better experience. Cloud is just one of the enablers to achieve this.
EaaS has been growing so fast that we are probably not too far of life as a service (LaaS), where all of the daily chores are offered as a service for a fixed fee. All of the tangible things around you can be packaged into a combination of services and products without having to figure out how they work or how to maintain them. One fixed cost in return for piece of mind and personal time saved to get on with your life. You simply focus on the objective at hand and the rest is done in the background.
It is clear that there is a value for both the consumer and the brand with the EaaS approach. I am not suggesting that all brands should adapt their business models to offer serviced products, but instead they should recognise the shift towards the need for making life easier for the end customer and then turning this into a competitive advantage.
