Customer Obsession
According to Bezos, customer obsession is not just listening to customers; it is about inventing on their behalf. Because of technology, customers today are more empowered, have more choices, and have higher expectations causing a shift in power from companies to customers. Without a profound understanding of what your customers want, it will become tough to attract and retain customers. More than ever, customer obsession is the only real sustainable competitive advantage. In this year’s annual letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos wrote:
“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static — they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before — in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.”
The above quote reminded me of the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. In the book, she tells Alice that the world keeps shifting so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position. We are now in a similar world and being customer-centric is table stakes. Listening to customers is like Alice running just to keep her position. To survive, one needs to profoundly understand the unmet, unarticulated needs of the customers. Ben Thompson rightly calls it the antidote for disruption.
Finally, here’s something to think:
How are you transforming the customer experience?
Are you using technology to enable customer obsession?
Are you going beyond the current digital touch-points?
Here are a few things I thought were worth sharing this week:
Bezos sat down with Axel Springer CEO Dr. Mathias Dopfner to talk about Amazon, Washington Post, & Blue Origins. You can also learn a lot about the various aspects of his life that shaped him.
Hiten Shah: How Netflix Became a $100 Billion Company in 20 Years
Check out my colleagues:
- Max Majonis on functional animation
- Arusha Jaiswal on dark patterns in UX.
My article on bounded rationality from last week in case you missed it.
