WHY LG?
#6 We reduce friction
Success isn’t supposed to be easy. It can be fun, rewarding, motivating; but it’s not easy.
Often, friction exists in businesses communication and processes that inhibit success. At LG, we purposely seek to eliminate friction to make working with us a more efficient, friction-less experience for our hospitality partners and end-customers.
This experience begins with the product. You need to have a highly innovative product but you also need to have regionalization and customization processes to ensure the solution is, in fact, solving problems and not creating a whole new series of smaller challenges. Voice of Customer (VoC) is the primary driver for new product innovation, features and support initiatives. While LG innovations like OLED, NanoCell, Pro:Centric, and the new UV-C Robot exemplify pure innovation, it’s the fact that we have an engineering team in Illinois supporting regionalization and custom processes — like Pro:Centric Direct development, escalation & resolution support, software/firmware upgrades, design modifications, new product recommendations, evaluations and other integrator/client requests — that help assure a friction-less customer experience. If you don’t have the right product and/or processes in place to efficiently address client input then you’re creating inhibitors, inefficiencies and, ultimately, friction.
Connectivity, interoperability and backward compatibility are friction hot-spots — especially in our business! Hospitality televisions and systems are not commodities as some lesser brands might pitch. TVs do need to plug and play but proactive heavy-lifting on the backend assures that they will work with legacy systems; they’ll connect and play with minimal set-up and personalization via a human-centric UI will help advance the guest experience.
If things go askew at any point — and we’re the first to admit that they inevitably do from time to time — concierge-grade support systems help ensure moments of friction are minimized as best as possible. Admitting this and putting dedicated teams in place to support integrators and end-users is a huge friction eliminator. LG is one of the only hospitality television provider with its own after sales service team and LG employed technicians who complement integrator teams and provide properties with comprehensive remote and on-site support. These teams help eliminate property/brand:guest friction!
I think it’s easier to do business with someone you can relate to. If you share a worldview or value-set, there’s less explaining, debating, negotiating or equivocating. Instead, you get straight down to business. At LG we have a strong commitment to sustainability, and hospitality clients who share this commitment often naturally gravitate to LG because they understand the efforts we’re making to ensure our products are manufactured in an environmentally-responsible manner, that they also perform efficiently and we operate our business with sustainability front of mind.
Likewise on ethics, brands that share ethical standards often naturally gravitate to one another and the mutual trust they establish lessens friction to doing business. The LG Jeong-Do Management system seeks to improve capabilities and requires that we compete fairly, based on ethical management. The Jeong-Do system emphasizes responsibility to customers, employees, vendors, stakeholders and society and is truly pervasive in our global organization.
All of the above contribute to strong relationships with channel partners and end-users to help ensure that mutual understanding exists, that we have the responsiveness and customer/integrator care systems in place, and that we continue to innovate at the highest level.
By doing so, we help save our customers and partners the time, resources and frustration of friction and make the guest experience increasingly friction-less. This is important in the pandemic as we seek to reduce person-to-person contact. Consider webOS and Pro:Centric and how they enable hospitality televisions to serve as a portal for guest services including check out, service requests, hotel information, casting, voice control, phone as remote, concierge services, wayfinding and other important information that might otherwise require a front-of-house staffer. Also consider LG digital signage and how it can integrate with Pro:Centric for wayfinding, amenities and communicating health protocols.
Success is hard to come by — especially these days — but the business school advice of eliminating friction is well-placed within the LG organization and well-received among systems integrators and hospitality customers. I’m proud that it’s been central to our operating philosophy in the hospitality team in my 17 years at LG and it’s consistently the first answer I give when asked, “Why LG?”
