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Identifying small but numerous enhancements to your customer experience could help you dominate your market, says Fabian Wong, chief creative officer and head of experience and design at Capita.
Globally, retail is moving at a pace that is, in my view, astonishing. We are in a marketplace where changes come very rapidly and are highly disruptive.
When I observe the UK high street, and the online and mobile commerce around it, I can see how retailers are striving to improve their digital and customer experiences.
Make ripples not radical changes
Many players in the market try to achieve this by doing something radical in order to be totally different from their competitors.
However, I’ve developed my own theory and see the market through the lens of a simple 3% rule. As long as your customer experience is better than your competitors’ by 3% at any key touchpoint, that should be enough to give you a more dominant market share.
“I see the market through the lens of a simple 3% rule”
If you think about using Amazon or other such services in the market, do you really see that service as being massively different or is it actually an accumulation of lots of +3% margins across the whole customer journey?
My gut feeling is that the top players are in fact spending no more than 3% of their effort to create differences in areas that really matter within the entire user journey or within their orchestration effort.
They look at where that 3% is going to make a serious difference and then they rely on a ripple effect to spread that transformation.
“The top players are spending no more than 3% of their effort to create differences in areas that really matter”
If you throw enough little differences into the pond, eventually the ripples combine and reinforce the effect, becoming highly impactful. When those ripples rebound off industry edges and fold back on themselves, that creates market turbulence, which redefines and amplifies where the new normal lies.
In a very agile market place, which is constantly changing, I think that’s enough to keep you in the top spots.
Choose your 3% wisely
You need to be very smart about where and how you apply that 3%.
For example, in the UK, when you order anything online, you’re usually told the day on which it will be delivered. But in locations with advanced logistics, such as Tokyo, that delivery prediction will be by the hour.
Moving your business from the promise of a day delivery to an hour delivery would put you in a completely different competitive space. But the logistical effort and expense to do that would be massive, a lot more than the 3% rule.
So you need to understand your own sectors and subsectors and the culture of your market to determine in which areas 3% is achievable and which will deliver the greatest impact.
This is where Capita can play a practical role in helping retailers find and enhance the 3% of their customer experience that will create the greatest ripple effect in the marketplace.
Our experience provides us with a very a strong layer of understanding of what really counts, so we really can make a difference.
Fabian Wong is chief creative officer and head of experience and design at Capita, where he is responsible for driving ‘human brilliance’ in experience design. He is a strategic creative professional whose work extends across more than 100 countries. He has more than 20 years’ experience advising clients from Europe to Asia on large-scale digital strategy, creative, planning, risk and digital transformation.
