Do you want to challenge the business-as-usual way of doing things? Is your organization prepared to take on the biggest players in your industry and make them play by your rules?
When you aim to disrupt an industry, it’s not enough to build a successful company. You want to challenge the status quo and shake up the industry. The quickest way to gain market position against established stakeholders is to pull the rug out from under them.
To do that, you need a plan to empower customers and create new markets that will upset those established players.
The Age of Customer Empowerment
Technology is driving an age of hyper-empowered consumers. Their behaviors and expectations have been transformed by data richness. They’re accustomed to having all the information they need and more.
When businesses withhold that information, customers quickly become frustrated, turn off, and seek alternatives that put more power in their hands.
Any organization looking to create new markets in an established industry should look toward customer empowerment as a way of challenging bigger players. If you can offer what other industry players can’t, you can create a market that others won’t be able to ignore.
How to Become Consumer-Centric
Putting the consumer first is a fast track to disruption. More often than not, technology is the key to putting that power in consumers’ hands.
Look no further than some of the leading examples of consumer empowerment. Nobul is a company that’s brought the Uber model to real estate, an industry that has been stuck in its ways to the benefit of service providers, not consumers.
Real estate agent fees have been stuck in the past, with little competition or pressure to change the way these services are provided – until Nobul came along.
What Nobul did is best explained in the words of Founder and CEO Regan McGee. Speaking to Yahoo! Finance, McGee said about the company’s success:
“We created the world’s first open and digital marketplace where every real estate agent from every agency can compete against one another to represent buyers and sellers. So, if you’re looking to buy or sell real estate, you could come on our platform, put in some basic information about yourself, and agents from all the different brokerages will compete against one another to represent you.”
The platform gives consumers access to verified reviews and information about a real estate agent’s past transactions. Agents give more detailed information about their services and free breakdowns, and consumers walk away with more information before they make a decision.
Technology Makes Consumer Empowerment a Core Feature
It’s not enough to tell your customer service team that the “consumer comes first.” Today’s consumers want it to be a core feature of any business or service they use. They already get it on the apps they use on their phones, and that means companies trying to make a mark today need to leverage technology to put consumer empowerment front and center. The alternative will be losing business to more innovative competitors.
