It is the first Saturday after your salary, imagine that tonight you are going for dinner with your spouse. Your spouse chose a new restaurant after a lot of searching because the search engine showed that it was the most popular among the new restaurants. Customers have given it the highest five-star rating. But after dinner it starts raining heavily and you don’t get a single cab to return home. With great difficulty you reach home late at night and fall asleep tired. Now think, what will you tell your guests on Sunday – about the restaurant, or the experience you had on the road? Even if you talk about both, I am sure you will talk more about the bad experiences than the good ones. Now take another example of buying a car or property. Sitting at home, such a person has to visit various websites selling cars or property. These sites will quote their prices. The person will have to make a comparative chart of those prices on a paper. Visiting these sites may not be a pain, but it sure takes time. There is no single site where prices of all vehicles are shown together. Insurance price, RTO charges and other necessary charges should also be mentioned. But now it is not so. DBS Bank of Singapore does this. It has moved from a product-centric strategy to an experience-based strategy. Meaning, instead of selling separate financial products, it offers integrated offers according to the different needs of the customers. Car buyers not only get the price of the vehicle, but they can also compare the insurance price, RTO fees of different vehicles. Along with this, bank financing facility is also available. By creating a single ‘platform’ for all these things, DBS Bank is no longer just a lending bank, but has made itself the center of the customer’s end-to-end journey. This means redesigning the customer journey from the outside in, starting with ‘What does the customer want to achieve?’ DBS Bank is no longer focusing on how to sell its financial products. Instead of targeting a loan for property or a car, he has become someone who wants you to buy a car or a house. The bank has transformed itself into an orchestrator rather than a finance provider by adding services like property search, legal services, insurance and goods shifting to its financing offerings. With this he captures data of the entire decision process of the customer. The relationship with the customer deepens and makes it difficult for the customer to leave your site. Most service providers compete to increase their visibility on the site. Like hotels competing to appear in the first five or ten results, or like restaurants competing to get five-star reviews. But how many of them think about providing pick-up facility to the customer by taking information from the booking data. If the above mentioned restaurants had a drop-in facility even for an additional fee and the restaurant manager had informed you about heavy rains and assured you of good transport facilities, then don’t you think the restaurant experience would have been better than five-star for you? The bottom line is that if businesses start providing customer experience on the same site instead of just promoting their products in the digital world, this ‘platformization’ will attract many customers. Because it is like offering a bouquet of different flowers at one place.
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N. Raghuraman’s column: ‘Platformization’ is becoming a new opportunity to re-invent business
