Banks face a bigger threat than rival banks as customers seek best experience

Innovation and media specialist Tom Goodwin had some pertinent advice for companies, big and small, during a recent visit to Australia from New York.

If banks think they are competing with other banks in terms of the functionality and appearance of their app, they are wrong. Ditto for airlines if they believe they are in competition only with rival airlines.

In an increasingly connected world, argues Goodwin, consumers’ expectations are being set by the best experience anywhere.

He says: “Increasingly, when we experience something amazing, it sets the bar for everyone. You get off the plane in Shanghai and you can see your Uber driver’s face and his name and his rating, and it seems really odd when your parcel delivery company says: ‘It might be there on Tuesday afternoon.’ We need to be mindful of that.”

Goodwin, a New York-based executive vice-president and head of innovation at Zenith Media, was in Australia in late May to address the NextGen in Business conference, an Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry initiative.

Consumers won’t be forgiving of inconvenience and poor service for much longer, he warned conference delegates.

In the meantime, he suggests, consumers are being left frustrated and resentful by technologies that don’t work as well as they should. The world, he says, is in the “mid-digital age”, otherwise known as “the amazing age of disappointment”. While technology is improving every day, consumer expectations are rising even faster.

In the pre-digital age, he notes, everything worked because everything had just one purpose. There were cassettes for music and newspapers for news. But increasingly, the lines between various forms of entertainment are being blurred. And, Goodwin notes: “Nothing really works.”

Consumers are required to have multiple passwords, and messages arrive in different places such as email, Facebook messenger, text and WhatsApp. Consumers are forced to spend time worrying about messages that might not reach the desired destination, spam filters that don’t work and mobile phone coverage and battery life.

“Things have never been more complex,” says Goodwin.

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Source: Banks face a bigger threat than rival banks as customers seek best experience | afr.com