In this module, we'll talk about something exciting. This is about how companies can move upstream in the customer journey. Now, we talked about something predicting customer journey, making it shorter. Let's try to contrast this. Let's take an example first to get started. When you start thinking about search, perhaps Google is the first company that comes to your mind. Look at these numbers. What they're suggesting is when people are searching for products to buy, in fact, if anything, Amazon is much higher than Google and for prime users, the difference between Amazon and Google is even higher. What does that suggest? What that suggests is that if you are an Amazon Prime customer, when you go on the Amazon website, what Amazon is able to do is not just to recommend you products, but what they are able to do is to curate your entire journey. Which is if you are thinking about buying, let's say a smartphone and you go on Amazon looking at your past purchases, looking at all the things that they know about you, they might be not just able to recommend what smartphone you should be buying, but they might be able to, "look at your entire customer journey of how you should go about buying it." That's the idea of moving upstream in the customer journey. Let's revisit the example of Amazon Alexa and Google Home. When I talked about this example, we had talked about Google Home and Amazon Alexa shortening the customer journey. Let's further this example a little bit in terms of how they own the customer journey. For Amazon, for example, of course, also owns Whole Foods. Let's think about an application, Amazon Alexa, where you can, in some sense, make a grocery lists. You can certainly make a grocery list and keep that grocery list there, that's fine, but you can also in some sense at the end, then decide that you would like to order from Whole Foods. What is this doing? What this is doing is it's not just a way of shortening the customer journey, it's entirely curating that whole journey right from the awareness stage where you might start using Amazon Alexa to make your grocery lists, then you go ahead and order from Alexa, it will also make the purchase for you. Similarly, the Google Home, you can start searching for restaurants nearby, but you can also make reservations on it. That's the point I want to get across here with many other examples of how as a company, you can then start thinking about not just shortening the customer journey or predicting the customer journey. You can start thinking what I call owning the customer journey. I want you to bring your attention to something called super apps. For example, you might be comfortable going on your phone and go into a Facebook app, a Twitter app, perhaps on a Spotify app, for instance. These are separate apps. What that means is you go on Twitter, you go and look at what's happening on Twitter, you come back out, you go on Facebook, and so on, so forth, you're visiting different apps. What's happening in many other countries as well is that there are many applications which are called super apps, which in some sense have become the landing page. Of it everyone goes for a variety of different things. As an example, in Korea, it's Ka Talk, in China, it's WeChat, and so on, so forth. What do these apps do? They have become big portals. For example, in China, you can use WeChat to pay your peers money, just like you would use Venmo here, for example, in the US, you can of course have the social network environment in there, you can perhaps make purchases, you can talk to other businesses. Pretty much, it's become the landing page. Now you can imagine how different that experience is for a customer may using WeChat or a Ka Talk as compared to perhaps using a Facebook or a Twitter. Why? Because in some sense, what WeChat, Ka Talk and in India has something called Paytm. What are they trying to do? They are becoming in some sense the curators of your customer journey. That's what I mean by going upstream. You are in some sense becoming the place where customers go when they start the journey. Let's take another example from the entertainment perspective. In the US you have many different streaming platforms. Roku is one of them, Apple TV is another, and so on. Now, when you start thinking about this, why do I say that they are also in some sense, figuring out how to go upstream? For those of us who might have used Roku, for instance, the way the platform is set up is that you have different tiles. Let's say you have Netflix, Amazon Prime, many other applications. What do you end up doing? You end up thinking about what you want to watch. You go to a Netflix style and go down the Netflix streaming app, look for things and so on. Apple TV, for example, and Amazon Fire a quite different. There you end up looking at what you want to search for and they might show you all different places where you can find it. Look at the different ways in which, in some sense by using either Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire Stick, you're in some sense getting a very different experience. The way they are curating your customer journey is different. Roku, for example, curates that journey, but different streaming platforms. You decide you want to access Netflix or Amazon Prime or something else, Disney Plus, for instance. Whereas on Apple TV, you start by thinking of the content that you want to watch. Notice the two different ways in which you can go about it. Of course, these two different ways have different implications of what the customer journey would be like. Let's think about healthcare. Of course, healthcare is very fragmented industry. There are lots and lots of things going on in healthcare. I want you to bring your attention to the idea of who owns the data and why do I bring up the same company that we've talked about before? The example that I have on this page about Apple, about Amazon, about Cuckoo. The same companies that we had talked about before are now making inroads into health care. Of course, for Apple, it's a lot about what I call mobile technologies. It's all lot about variables. The Apple Watch that you wear, the form that you have, of course, it's becoming more and more compatible with a lot of different kinds of perhaps measurements that you want to take. The Apple Watch can perhaps look at what your heart rate is like and all of that. Technology is making healthcare more personalized as the Apple slogan says. Similarly, Amazon is getting into health care as well. Google, for instance, is looking at many other companies that are looking into, for example, doing a lots of early tests, studies and so on. The big question here, of course, is whether you're going the Apple route, the Google route, Amazon, whatever the case might be, is who owns the data? What could be happening in terms of where the data lies and what kinds of applications can be built on that data. Again, going back to the Apple example, clearly by looking at their phones, the watches that they have, the apps that they have. How they're trying to in some sense, make health care more personalized. Clearly, if you buy into the Apple ecosystem, you clearly might be in some sense locked into that ecosystem in terms of all the different facilities that they have. Thinking about who owns the data becomes quite critical even in healthcare environment. Now let's also take an example of what I call upstream and then downstream. What is the idea here? The idea here of course is, we've taken many examples of how companies can go upstream, which is thinking about awareness, thinking about how they can shorten the journey, own that journey and so on. But of course the journey doesn't stop once somebody purchases. The journey continues. Why? Because there are many other purchases that somebody can make. For instance, Casper company here in the US, that basically gives mattresses for much lower prices. What does it want to be? It wants to be what they call the Nike of sleep. What's the idea here? They want to in some sense own that particular vertical of "sleeping." They want to think about what other facilities can they offer. What other products can they offer, which is beyond mattresses as well. Similarly, Nectar, another competitor, wants to expand their product line. The idea here is, when you start thinking about the customer journey, you don't just think about the initial part of the customer journey which is going upstream, you also start thinking about what happens when that particular purchase is done, are there other things that you can also offer to that customer? Let's take some another example. Airbnb. Of course, Airbnb is very popular service to in some sense, go ahead and if you want to take a vacation, you can go ahead and either rent a room in somebody's house, you can rent the entire house and so on. But what Airbnb also realized is when people take a vacation, they're not just going there to stay in somebody's apartment or a house. They want to do many other activities. If you notice Brian Chesky, who's one of the co-founders of Airbnb, basically says for every dollar you spend in a hotel, you spent $3 in that city, where you eat the entertainment, all you do all day. They basically want to think of this as a long-term opportunity. There's something called Airbnb experiences. If you go on Airbnb, you can see that. For example, let's say you want to go to Philadelphia or New York. You can go ahead and see what are the things that are out there in that city as you start traveling? That's where I talk about going upstream, but also going downstream, which is owning the customer journey not just from the point of view of just the initial choice, but owning that entire experience. Let's take one more example. This time from a B2B perspective, business to business perspective. Shopify of course, is a very big company which helps small and medium businesses go on the web. That's how they started. In some sense you can think about, the local mom and pop store wants to go on the Internet. How did they set it up? Shopify made it easy. What did they start with? They basically started out by offering services where you could in some sense, put your website very easily on the web, setup all the backend and so on, so forth. You as a company owner, did not really need to be tech savvy, Shopify will handle it. Then they basically said once you in some sense gotten people on the website, well, perhaps we can also start offering point-of-sale services. Shopify started offering point-of-sale services within the store. First they were online, then they became offline. In some sense they started integrating more so with their customers, other businesses. Then they said, "Great. Now that we've got online and you've got offline, we can then start thinking about one big requirement for the companies, which is inventory." Then they started going into Shopify fulfillment networks. In this way, actually they've become a competitor to Amazon, but they're offering Shopify fulfillment networks to their small and medium businesses. That's great as well, but of course, you can imagine, as Shopify gets to know more about customers, what else do they start thinking about? Well, which customers should we give money to? That's where they've gotten into funding. Look at that entire journey from Shopify's perspective and their customer's perspective. Shopify started at the end so to speak. They started thinking about how customers, their customers, which are businesses can go on the web, then they started moving upstream, are also moving downstream. Thinking about funding, thinking about fulfillment, all the different point pinpoints that their customers other businesses may have. That's what I mean by thinking carefully about the customer journey and moving upstream and downstream. What I see here is that before we get into new technology, before we start thinking about AI applications, don't put the cart before the horse. Start with the why. What are your customers needs? What exactly are you solving for? How are you solving for is important. But starting with the how sometimes can make you forget about the why? Critically start thinking about the why first, whether you're a B2B company, whether you're a B2C company, to me thinking about customer needs is critical. Once you think about the customer needs then you start thinking about what kind of technology may be helpful. Is it vision AI perhaps? Is it language AI or voice AI? What is it? To me, that's the next way of thinking about the hub. Then you have a good synergy between the why and the how. Here's what I would ask you to think about. When you start thinking about how you are addressing your customer needs, what rule are you playing? Are you playing a role in the customer journey in terms of moving upstream? The examples that I had given you was about Shopify, the Roku examples, even Amazon Prime, and Google Home, where you're curating that entire journey. That's a big win if you can have that. But of course you can start smaller as well. Start first by thinking about can you predict the next customer journey? That's about predictions. Those are the examples I was giving you around Amazon when it predicts, for example, based on what you purchased, what is the next thing you're going to buy? Of course you can also start thinking about shortening the customer journey. Think about where you can play the best role and then start thinking about technology that you have, the data assets that you have that can help you play that role.
