Consumer Trends - Expectations Spread Like Wildfire



Consumer Trends - Expectations spread like wildfire.


 As a distributor of specialised technology products my main challenge in recent years has been to keep one eye on the competition and the other on consumer trends. In the past, this was much different because products did not change very rapidly and the focus of the sales department was more on relationships, feature benefits and price.

Today, technology products evolve so quickly there is little time to adjust if you miss or ignore consumer purchasing trends. This is particularly the case if you are not in control of product development and therefore often less commercially agile. 

When I talk about consumer purchasing trends I mean the way in which consumers are progressively expecting products to look and to work both in a physical sense and in terms of delivery and functionality.. 
This is probably best explained through examples.

The Experience Factor 

 

If it is a physical product then consumers now seem to expect an “experience” when they purchase a new product and, not unlike the foodie expression which tells us that restaurant diners “eat with their eyes first”, technology consumers also experience the purchase right up to final commissioning, initially through their eyes. This is why, for example, product packaging and presentation means so much to the modern consumer.

Apple led the way in this area with their i-Phone products. Every aspect of the packaging was neat, precise, shiny and hi-tech looking and people lapped it up, even video recording it for posterity (or notoriety) and posting it on their Facebook page. The Apple inspired “open box reveal” is now ubiquitous on Youtube and their standard of quality, packaging and presentation is the exception rather than the rule. 

Consumers expect the Apple experience every time they buy something new. If they don’t get it they feel "robbed" of the experience and begin to question product quality and, at least to some degree, a poor un-boxing experience invalidates their buying decision and all of a sudden you have a terminal case of buyer’s remorse and a negative review on your website!

Have we become so obsessed with the "experience" that we sometime forget why we are buying something? Probably, but who are we to argue with the consumer?

Your Head is in the Clouds!

 

If it is a business software application the consumer now often expects that it will be a cloud based product which, for an absolute minimum amount of effort and no upfront investment, will self-configure and magically start saving hours or administration time while massively reducing the costs of running their business.  Significantly, for many simple applications (and for some not so simple ones too) this is not that far from the truth, such has been the advancement of cloud based software.

From my own experience in sales and marketing I now have at my disposal almost magical cloud applications that automate many sales and marketing, operational and administrative processes. As an added bonus they integrate with other unrelated applications in my business such as accounting and CRM Software. Where proprietary integration is not provided I simply use a cloud based conduit product to glue the applications together using pre-configured API’s . This seamless integration dramatically increases my sales and marketing reach while significantly reducing back-end manual processes allowing me to handle more inquiries and fulfill many more orders with fewer staff.

Now this in itself has ostensibly always been achievable through expensive ERP Systems but not without enormous costs and the use of expensive programmers to stitch applications together. Today it is achievable by end users with no programming experience at all… such is the power of the latest cloud applications.

Great Expectations


 Fueled by my own experience, I now expect this level of integration, usability and functionality from every application I trial or at least that is my new benchmark for even bothering to invest what little available time I have to explore a new app. To a large extent these products deliver but there is a reason why they do and it is tied very closely to two very important factors.

1. How standard are my processes?
2. How much am I willing to change my processes to fit the application?

With these factors in mind it becomes clear why for example, accounting packages are perfect products to convert to cloud applications. By nature, all accounting processes are standardised. They must conform to standards and the internationally applied procedures of double entry book keeping and, as long as they are configurable to local tax and reporting requirements, they are very much plug and play applications.

In the above example the answer to Question 1 is very and the answer to Question 2 is there is no need to! The end result is an easy transition to a web based application that easily meets the expectations of the modern cloud based application user.


Horses for Courses
 
Now take for example a product from my own range – time and attendance software. Time and attendance is the process of collecting employee attendance times (often from hardware devices such as time clocks) and converting them, according to predefined rules, into payroll hours in various time categories. These hours and time categories can then be exported to a payroll software which turns those hours in to dollar values for the purpose of actually paying employees.

For a simple explanation of how time and attendance events are treated in a plethora of different ways take a look at this recent post, but for the purpose of this article you can take it as read that there are so many permutations that it becomes impossible to create a “standard” configuration for the way an employee's attendance is calculated.

This doesn’t mean that a cloud attendance system is impractical - in fact there are many excellent products on the market but it does mean that even cloud attendance applications require a high degree of configuration and this is behind one of the biggest problems we currently face – the propensity of new prospects to expect software applications to be up and running in minimal time with minimal effort.

Lessons Learned

In my business, we have ways of dealing with this and I will discuss theses in a later post. That aside the main reason for this article is to highlight that consumer trends and expectations may present greater challenges to your business than many of your direct competitors.

I have to say that I have been aware of this trend towards cloud products for many years but what I initially failed to do is take it seriously for time and attendance products because by their very nature they do not lend themselves well to being fully featured, turnkey cloud products. 

In relation to this I was correct and I believe I still am but what I should have reacted to earlier is the expectation many end users have that fully featured time and attendance should be available in the cloud and at least initially, they will except nothing less.

So, in summary and with hindsight I should have done the following much earlier and if you are not you probably should too -

  • Pay closer attention to consumer expectations and not just those around your product but in a much broader sense.
  • Look at how current products fit into the cloud model and make them fit, make them fit better or change to another product if you can sooner rather than later.
  • Take it as a certainty that the tendency will be for consumers to demand simplicity and minimal effort. If your product does not meet this standard this then it is probably not long for this world.
  • Don't hang on grimly to products that don’t fit the model because nothing is more certain than the prediction that you will find yourself languishing in the wake of more agile competitors who saw it all coming and responded to the trends.
  • Have a plan for transitioning your products to meet the expectations of the market.
  • Be ready to put up with a lot of initial pain for some long term gain when transitioning rather than a lot more pain than you need.
  • If your product is intrinsically difficult to translate to the web than your sales and marketing should guide inquiries away from looking at or trying to find cloud alternatives. 


If you liked this article or you have anything you would like to say feel free to comment.


You can also email me at jimc@timeandattendance.com.au if you have a subject you would like me to post about.

Jim Courtwood


















Location: Australia

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