On 12/6/21 15:56, Jean St-Laurent wrote:
I vouch for fairness.
It seems there might be a shift in how we consume services around the world.
It's like a train. You can't turn 90 degrees. You need to start a smooth curve
many miles ahead if you want your train to turn and reach the destination.
How leaders govern will be more important. The decisions they make today and
the partners they choose will set the direction for this train.
The problem with this approach is that it assumes industrial-revolution
business practices where corporations set the standard, and customers
follow.
This does not work anymore in the modern world, because what the content
folk have done is create platforms where users set the the standard, and
corporations follow.
In the old days, if a service didn't work, we complained, sued, cried,
the lot, and took it on the chin. Nowadays, if a service doesn't work,
you silently delete the app, and move on to someone else.
But corporations don't get good (read: negative) feedback, because they
are too busy building and selling products, rather than build and
selling experiences, like the content folk do. Because they are blind to
this feedback, they don't see the churn that is happening (after all,
it's like a slow tyre leak), as users quietly migrate for a better
experience, and not a better product. 5 years later, they wonder how
they lost 50% of their customer base. I'm already seeing it with a
number of traditional banks, here in Africa.
Gartner (another typical corporation) just shared this the other day:
https://ibb.co/c8PFRyQ
... and as you can clearly see, the "customer" experience is not top of
their agenda for the typical CEO, for the coming year. Instead, it's a
bunch of other things that make zero sense. How do you grow if you don't
look after customers?
Users have moved on so fast due the ascension of the base expectation of
value, companies that are willing to consider that the best they can do
is create an experience that improves the likelihood of a user giving
them a chance - rather than forcing a product sale on customers with the
intention of meeting the YoY target that was printed in the boardroom
PPT slides - will be the ones that have a chance to not only survive,
but actually flourish.
If Amazon can democratize the mobile network by providing a cloud-based
EPC, we might never have to be subjected to the unimaginative services
we pay lots of money for, to typical mobile operators. I mean, if there
is anyone with the time, money, people, data and network, it's surely
Amazon, as well as the peers in their group.
Maybe cloud boys and girls are also about to get a fair shake.
What the cloud and content folk have perfected is the art of being
unsatisfied with the current customer experience. Their continued search
for how they can make just one thing about their service better and more
pleasurable to use, is what keeps them in favour with the user. For as
long as they can maintain that ethos, they will be setting the rules.
It does help that they also play well together, so they don't have
out-compete each other for business like we, in the telco world,
continuously do... much to our collective detriment.
Mark.
