Engineering the 'Switch'

Whether you are planning a new product /platform/service, it is most likely that the target customers are already doing the same thing in a ( less efficient/more cumbersome/ costlier/ longer) way but doing it all the same. Be it a financial transaction or a business process or a life activity.

It is also likely that the alternatives to ‘current way of doing things’ are also many. In the digitally native world, there are literally 100s of taxi ride apps, e-commerce apps, payment apps, news apps, personal finance apps….

So you are starting with a ‘set, old way of doing things’ and a bunch of alternatives to ‘ do it better’. Since digital world is all about ‘user adoption’, getting the user/customer to ‘do it your way’ is the absolutely critical thing.

How to engineer this switch?

1. Power of Inertia : Nothing is your bigger enemy than inertia. Inspite of cheaper loans, cards with better rewards, data plans with better goodies etc, only a small percentage of customers switch to the ‘smarter’ option. Why? Simply because it takes effort to change and also the comfort with the present.
2. Small ‘Delta’ : No matter how great you think about your product/service/platform and consider everything else to be from stone age, most of the times customers find that the delta between the ‘current’ and ‘new’ is not significant. Combine this with the pain of change and you can be sure , what the customer would do.
3. Power of ‘Viral’: Functionally an Amazon Pay or Google Pay or Apple Pay might be better than Paytm. But if paytm is viral across the population compared to others, the functional differentiation does not matter.
4. Power of ‘Soft’ factors : Inspite of how ‘you want the customer to think’, customer processes/likes/dislikes on their own criteria. Customer may pick a product not necessarily based on what gives most value but which is ‘easiest/smoothest to use’, which is ‘more fun to use’ ( think gamification) and which has nicer bells and whistles.

So how to engineer the switch?

a. Focus on the product attributes that make the delta the largest possible

b. Look for items/ make it easy to share /crowd source/like/viral

c. Sweat the ‘soft’ stuff. Remember , most of the digital natives are young and younger. User Experience, Gamification, Fun…