The Entire Experience is the Product

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Imagine you’re a car manufacturer, a major sports team, or the loans division of commercial bank.

What’s your product? Why, the automobile, baseball team or commercial loan, one might respond.

But is that all there is to each experience? Driving the car, sitting in the stadium watching the game, using the commercial loan to expand your business?

In fact, these are only part of the story – the most important part, perhaps, but not the whole thing.

Buying a car begins with the initial research and ends when you sell or otherwise dispose of the car.

In order to sit in a stadium with your family watching your team, you may have to order tickets on-line, download the required apps, drive to the stadium, park your car, line up at ticket entry and so on. And then you have to reverse the process to get home.

Likewise, your loan experience begins with the research and loan application experience, and ends somewhere far downstream.

You get the picture. Nowadays, the entire experience is the product. We need to understand the entire customer journey, not just the ‘most important parts’.

We need to understand the customer’s pain points and hassles across the entire journey.

Our car may be the best in its class, but the servicing it is an lengthy expensive nightmare.

We may have a splendid baseball team, but getting the stadium entails walking through dangerous neighborhoods and or maybe getting your car vandalized. And to get into weekend games you have to line-up, in the sun, for 45 minutes.

Our commercial bank may have the flashiest website but customers leave feeling stupid and confused by our jargon and lack of offer clarity.

Lean & Agile thinkers have to learn to think laterally, and to look upstream and downstream. Empathy means walking the customer’s shoes and feeling where the shoe pinches.

Radical collaboration is the new superpower. And the generalist, grounded in the fundamentals of good management, conversant in multiple disciplines and the latest technologies, ready to collaborate radically, and dissolve silos thereby, the new Spiderman… =)

Best regards,

Pascal