Nontrivial Exercises

Selling a True Digital Experience

The consumer electronics market is a thriving, robust industry, turning out wonderful, useful, powerful, amazing products (“toys” my wife calls them) at a break-neck pace. Look no further than the Consumer Electronics Show for example of the desire, demand – dare I even call it lust – for new digital machines that wow us, entertain us, streamline us and make us cool.

Yet consider this: how would you rate the quality of your entire “digital experience” with these products – the way they work alone, the way they work together, the ease of which you can configure them, the type of support you receive from the companies that make them, etc. I suspect your end-to-end digital experience is fractured and inconsistent at best. James Womack, in an article in the current edition of Fast Company asks the question: “How can individual goods and services get better and better while the experience of using them doesn’t?”

Womack goes on in the Fast Company article to ponder what consumers really want, and concludes that the products they (we) buy need to optimize their time, and truly solve a problem. One aspect of this is the way in which consumers interact with the companies that support these products, i.e. the dreaded yet ubiquitous help line.

Too many times companies produce a unique, quality product but then fail to address their customers’ entire experience of using the product. Help lines are a prime example of inefficiency and frustration for the consumer – who hasn’t had to plan a time to call up support when they had 30–45 minutes, a speaker phone and something else to do while they were on hold? Ironically, help desks and call centers are optimized for the efficiency and productivity of the company, not for the optimal experience of the customer.

In another related story, Forrester Research is beginning a series of investigations and research on the “Digital Experience Gap” in consumer electronics. Their First Look series announces that they will conduct research on how companies could tap the very open market of a complete, successful digital experience by combining products and services in a way that consumers can use to better integrate their devices to more holistically solve a problem or address a need (or desire as the case may be).

The initial research summary identifies four ways in which consumer electronics companies could bring a more satisfying digital experience to consumers:

• Manufacturers: sell products, services and content under a single SKU, or product code, and track the revenue against the product-service combination, and not as separate components.
• Service Providers: increase the number of service bundles they offer in order to increase the ways that their subscribers can connect and use content in their network.
• Retailers: design displays and examples in their stores that showcase entire solutions rather than individual products or services.
• Installation Services: offer holistic and complete installation services that will combine installations of several products in a home at once.

The Forrester article asserts that based on their analysis, the digital experience market is a $3.8B opportunity that is untapped today. They cite Apple, Tweeter and CEDIA as examples of companies that are successfully and effectively offering more complete digital experiences, but with $3.8B still on the table, it seems that this would be a prime area for other companies to pay attention to.

I completely agree with Forrester’s assertions, and strongly believe that there is a huge opportunity for companies to offer consumers a more integrated approach to selling and using the many devices and services available to them.

Now, if this need is so great for consumer electronics, I believe the concept also carries over to other industries. Of particular interest to me is the telecom industry. Many vendors are already realizing the need for a more sophisticated and combined approach to selling products and services. There is much talk about product and technology convergence in telecom – VoIP, GSM-CDMA-UMTS-WiMax to name a few – and much speculation about how vendors should invest their R&D dollars to be best prepared to produce the products that will be best suited for the next generation networks.

Yet, if we lose focus on the total customer experience – customer in this case being the service provider / operators first, and then their customers end-user customers – to offer products, services, support and integration that provide a complete solution to customers’ needs. I believe the most successful telecom companies, just like the most successful consumer electronics companies, will be the ones that offer the best and most complete digital experiences.