Digital Lizards

In all this competitive change sponsored by digital transformation and mobile technologies, a new agent has appeared, an agent capable of capitalizing on moments of passion in customers. It is not the traditional competition that we know, it is not another bank like us, or another airline, it is a new entity, digital to take into account. Let's analyze these new agents that appear in the most digital world.

Consider, for example, the successful PFM or the insurance policy buyers, the travel search engines as a new comparison of the agencies and airlines.

How to call these "new agents" to these revolutionary competitors? They do not offer us a better product, or an improvement in insurance premiums; They simply have the great capacity to provide a concrete value to the user at the right time with great leverage in the use of technology.

They can be called, for their ability to find that combination of value, technology and momentum "digital lizards".

These digital lizards have entered without history at a time where customers value the service and relevant information in a timely manner. It is lawful to grant them a great deal of merit of what is happening in terms of transformation in many industries. Let's see its most relevant features:

1. They provide a very specific value very leveraged in the digital channel.

2. They focus where the traditional business does not see it.

Consider the value they contribute, for example to the Current Account product when most entities hardly give added value on said product.

3. They have no interest in the base product. They are not going to be banks or insurance companies, they live on information and they intermediated it in order to contract products with third parties.

4. Information is your business. It is still "bleeding" for the traditional business that accumulates data and data on customers that this type of lizard is strained just by the information layer.

The question we should ask ourselves is why if more traditional companies, which have much more information about their customers, do not offer these services.

Why not stop singing songs of pain against them and offer something more powerful? They have had a privileged situation in terms of customers and information for many years. In fact, they continue to have much more information about customer behavior in their sector and persist in leveraging on strategies that “pile up” this knowledge, without returning value to their customers or improving their offer.

In most cases because they have focused too much on analyzing the advantages of a single omnichannel approach, without the complement of the ecosystem and therefore this strategy has become for them a leverage with no value returned in the business.

If they had considered the double omnichannel and ecosystem, it would not have been very difficult for them to conclude that they would have to develop new services such as PFMs or buyers as an added value to their base products in a coherent ecosystem strategy.

What else can we conclude apart from the two points we raised at the beginning of this article?

You have to compete thinking about improving the portfolio of new customers and use the information to attract customers. But this acquisition must be based on other components different from the characteristics of the products to the mere attributes of our brand.

If customers let a third party, without history in the sector, advise them on complicated products such as insurance, this means that selling based on product characteristics makes little sense. That the values of the brand are diluted at the time of renewal, can be discussed, but the customers are shouting when they behave in this way. The first and most important thing to learn when you start selling is: "listen to the customer"; Now each company must make the decisions it considers, lead or continue selling in an imaginary world that is ceasing to exist.

The latter is what is considered "digital transformation." First assume that customers are no longer the ones we had a few years ago, which relate to companies in different ways. Second, decide that what gave you value as a company must be “sold” within a different strategy and done by changing the organization; with it it doesn't go anywhere. Even the leaders in these sectors, Google, Microsoft, eBay, are endowed with new organizations and are transformed to respond to their customers in the areas in which they lead. If those who go first in the class have assumed many companies should, at a minimum, reflect on this.

What is clear is that the appearance of these new actors changes the rules of the game of their industry and, by extension, they transform it. They generally create a similar effect in the industry where they operate that can be generated by the leader of the industry if it becomes digitally transformed.

The industry leader and digital lazers have this ability to mutate the industry through its digital transformation or its appearance respectively.

The existence of the Digital Lazers is the best evidence that the phenomenon of digital transformation is already a fact that must be managed and capitalized conveniently by traditional corporations.