A recently released Walker report titled Customers 2020 revealed that by 2020, “customer experience will overtake product and price as the key brand differentiator, and therefore more emphasis will need to be placed on the experience a company delivers to create a competitive advantage.”
Today’s customers love to patronise companies who do not just exist for the purpose of creating a service but have an affinity for those that offer a bespoke model and have the capacity to respond to customers dynamic and ever changing demands.
In the week, I read the story of Airbnb, in my search for companies that leverage on customer experience as a game changer and have successfully used it as a differentiator.
The business model (Airbnb) and the value it gives to its patrons and customers is particularly instructive for those trying to create a business and scale up a business.
I actually thought it was an overnight success until I read that it took them about eight years to successfully build the business and even at some point it almost hit rock bottom.
Airbnb stands for air, bread and breakfast. It functions as an alternative to hotels and serves as a peer-to-peer apartment rental service providing a win-win situation for both the host and the guest.
The host gets extra income that should have ordinarily been into the hands of a hotel and the guest could pay less depending on location than what would have been paid for an hotel, the organisation gets its fees primarily from fees charged from facilitation and both parties (hosts and guests) are charged a fee.
The company is favourably positioned, as it does not have to function with the overhead expenses a hotel has to bear. The business has grown tremendously and expanded with more listings on its website; it does not own the locations or houses but just serves as a facilitator between the hosts and travellers.
The organisation leveraged on a need which was largely untapped, which was people monetising and making money from hitherto dormant or fallow assets and changed it into an experience which was well managed.
It also uses the model of crowd sourcing to get ideas from both hosts and guests on how to improve the customer experience by collaboration.
The addition of a travel wish list, which users can create to discuss places they would love to visit, also created more engagement with the website and brought with it new opportunities for people around the area where customers indicated their preference to visit.
This is in addition to the variety of places; it affords the guests the opportunity to take advantage of, rather than the traditional hotel room.
There are also rankings and reviews between both the hosts and guests, which also helps other intending partners make decisions about where they would want to stay.
While the organisation continues to provide a robust platform for these conversations to take place and by working on the customer journey, they are able to improve the experience for both parties.
Airbnb’s service has been used by 40 million people in more than 34,000 cities across 190 countries, and in the year 2013, it was recorded that over 10 million guests stayed with their different hosts.
In a bid to improve its guest experience, it looked at the customer journey critically and the organisation came to realise that not everything on the customer journey depended on the online experience, but the offline experience was also important.
This brought about the creation of a storyboard of all the experiences a customer goes through either online or offline, which included but not limited to the areas of booking, making payments, browsing through the pictures of locations or looking through the reviews.
The customer journey map is also shared with all team members which help everyone focus their energies appropriately. With the creation of the customer journey map, a lot of gaps where noticed, one of which birthed the idea of the neighbourhood guide, which was done to cater to guests who were holidaying in certain locations they had never visited before and needed “heads up” on what to expect.
This helped guests feel more comfortable and answer more specific questions and help guests make informed choices.
In closing, the words of the founder particularly are quite instructive, when he noted the frustrations they dealt with while building the business.
According to him, they were advised by their mentors to change tactics and shift focus from growing the business to offer better service to the customers they had presently. In his words “little by little, city by city it started growing. It started growing because we stopped focusing on growing, we stopped focusing on being successful and we started focusing on building something people love.”
Timeless advice I would say for any business regardless of the level.
Please follow me on twitter:@oluwafemioyefes
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