Adapted from The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: New Rules for Building A Business Around Today’s Customer by Blake Morgan
Half of US Gen Z social users make purchases on social media, according to data from Insider Intelligence. As many as 57 percent of Gen Z shoppers—or close to three in five—say they get items like clothing and shoes over the internet. This is followed by groceries, 24 percent; automobile parts or accessories, 21 percent; pharmaceutical products, 21 percent; home and garden, 21 percent; and children’s products, 19 percent.
Gen Z is the generation most likely to use buy now, pay later services to make a purchase, and they are also embracing other emerging digital payment technologies like mobile wallets, contactless solutions, and peer-to-peer payment apps.
We can remember back in 2012 when the then Domino’s CEO proclaimed that every company “is a technology company.” The company invested millions of dollars over the next few years on transforming Domino’s into the largest pizza company in the world with 15,900 stores in eighty-five countries and almost $18 billion in annual revenue. The next biggest pizza chain is Pizza Hut with $13 billion in revenue per year. In 2018, Forbes contributor Brian Solis interviewed their chief digital officer, Dennis Malone, who said about their success at making the pizza company more like an e-commerce company: “Our marketing and IT groups actually work together. Everyone on both of those teams is trying to achieve the same goals. We win together, we fail together.” There are more than fifteen ways to order pizza ranging from sending a pizza emoji over social media to a voice command on Google Home.
Increasingly, executives are having to learn more about technologies they never had to think about before. But you cannot just throw technology at a situation and expect the situation to fix itself. In fact, if employees do not like the technology, they won’t use it.
Jeff Bezos once said that it is just as important to pay attention to what customer trends don’t change, like customer demand around low prices, vast selection, and fast delivery. It’s as important to pay attention to customer preferences that remain constant as it is to pay attention to what does change. Most companies don’t need as much futurism as they just need to understand that in the future, customer experience demands are only increasing, not decreasing. Many are not even meeting the table stakes of customer experience.
The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership is a leadership playbook for making customer experience a core aspect of your business. Get your copy today.