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|In: Digital|Last Updated:

The future of the automobile industry seems pretty clear, and relevant to anyone involved in things Digital.

For those living in the suburbs, exurbs, and beyond, it will look a lot like it does right now: People will own or lease cars and use them to take themselves from place to place.

Having moved to a downtown condo a couple of years ago, I’m pretty confident a different model will become popular among us urbanites:

When I need a car, my NeedACar app will dispatch one. It will drive itself to wherever I am, take me wherever I want to go, and drive itself back to its home garage when I don’t need it anymore.

Imagine you (1) agree; and (2) are involved in strategic planning for a company in the industry. Plus, you’re digitally literate and consume science fiction at least occasionally — two essential qualifications.

And yes, while we’re exploring the automobile industry, the same thought processes apply to players in any other industry, too.

So … how do you size up your situation?

Start with the field of logical competitors, and how readily each of them can adapt to this new world of transportation.

Other automobile manufacturer/dealer consortia: These all have one certain and one potential advantage. The certain advantage is that no matter what the future looks like, someone will have to manufacture the cars. The potential one is brand loyalty: Even in an era of autonomous cars it seem likely that many drivers …well, in this scenario passengers … might have a preference for some makes and models over others.

But dealers will probably lack the scale needed to just house the fleets in question let alone manage them, and manufacturers by themselves have no ability to sell directly to consumers.

Uber: Using an app to get personal transportation to someone who needs it sounds a lot like Uber, except for the autonomous car part. Uber pretty much owns the mindshare of people who want on-demand transportation.

What Uber doesn’t have is a fleet of autonomous cars and the infrastructure that goes with one. Quite the opposite: Uber’s model works in large part because it’s made car ownership and maintenance Someone Else’s Problem.

Traditional taxi services do own and manage car fleets. But they haven’t even figured out how to compete with Uber. It’s unlikely they’ll figure out how to deal with on-demand autonomous self-service transportation.

Also, traditional taxis are pretty ugly.

Car rental companies would seem to be well-positioned for the scenario we’re exploring. They’re accustomed to managing large fleets and they’re in the business of providing vehicles on demand.

What they don’t have is the ability to cater to make-and-model preferences. Also, their fleets are concentrated in single large locations proximate to the local airport. In most cities the airport … and rental car centers … are located well away from the metro core, which means long delivery delays for the urbanites who are the core market for the service we’re talking about.

Turo and its brethren are Airbnb for car owners. If you won’t be using your car for a while you could make it available to people who need one.

With the addition of autonomous vehicles this model would seem to have a lot going for it — no need to own a fleet; a wide variety of makes and models on the street; and because the cars are self-driving the major inconvenience barrier — having to arrange meeting places to deliver and return the vehicle — goes away. It would, however, depend on car owners leaving their garage doors open.

Amazon: I have no idea what Amazon would bring to this party, beyond its obvious broad reach among consumers. Except for this: It didn’t occur to Best Buy that Amazon was even a competitor until far too late in the game, just as it didn’t occur to mainstream publishers that Amazon was a competitor until far too late in that game, and didn’t occur to traditional data-center outsourcers that Amazon might become a competitor until the game was nearly over.

Which gets us to the point of this little exercise: As companies dip their toes in the Digital waters, they’re (and by “they’re” I mean “you’re”) going to have to do far more than use Digital capabilities to gain an edge over the competitors they have right now.

They’re going to have to anticipate who their competitors will be once the innovation gears have gone through a few rotations.

Or, even better, they’ll choose some better competitors to beat than the ones they’re competing with right now.

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|In: App Dev Methodologies|Last Updated:

As participles go, “excited” is a bit too strong, but “interested” is too limp.

I’m trying to describe my reaction to the email I received from a major air carrier, letting me know I was only a couple of hundred miles short of a first-class round trip ticket to anywhere in the United States. And if I had no immediate travel plans that would take me over the top, I could buy enough miles to cover the spread.

The minimum miles purchase was 2,000 for $59. Not too bad, so I clicked where I needed to click and arrived at the checkout page, which informed me that in addition to the sixty buck price tag, I’d also have to pay $35 in administrative fees.

My wife used to shop at Herberger’s. No longer, because Herberger’s is no more. One reason, we’re convinced, is that we weren’t the only customers who, attracted to the store and website by the many discount coupons they sent us, were annoyed to find that the coupon we held at any given shopping moment could not be used to buy the merchandise we had in hand.

The terms and conditions associated with Herberger’s coupons put your average end-user license agreement to shame.

Which leads to this conclusion, which in turn will lead to the point of this week’s essay: When it comes to structuring any sort of promotion, keep stupid out of it, and empathy for customers in it.

In the case of my first class ticket I can imagine the discussions that led to the $35 admin fee: “Deal momentum” would carry enough customers through that the net revenue gain outweighed the net reduction in total sales volume.

The math probably works. But the psychology doesn’t. All things being equal, the next time I travel I’ll do my best to avoid the airline in question. It’s an entirely predictable outcome, which would have been avoided through the simple expedient of concealing the $35 admin fee … an utterly preposterous number … within the purchase price, just as e-tailers that offer free shipping do.

Which gets us to the point, which is software quality assurance.

No, really.

Increasingly, as part of Digital this and Digital that, businesses are paying far more attention to the customer experience than they used to. As part of this effort, they’re creating mechanisms to understand how customers feel about their interactions with the company.

For telephone callers, it’s standard practice for companies to record calls so as to measure how well their call center staff are handling customer requests and complaints. Web and mobile apps are tougher, but methods for evaluating the customer experience in these environments are rapidly increasing in accuracy and sophistication.

It’s what internal IT would call UAT — user acceptance testing, which, done well, includes end-user suggestions as to how to improve overall usability.

Paying attention to the (real, paying) customer experience on the web and through mobile apps is admirable. I’m in favor of it.

What I suspect receives too little attention, though, is that unlike internal applications, the web and mobile customer experience includes more than layout, design, and functionality.

It also includes matters of more substance, such as the $35 admin fee I’m griping about here, coupons that are (or, in the case of Herberger’s, weren’t) redeemable on e-commerce websites and mobile apps, and, for a third example, requiring shoppers to establish userid’s and passwords before being allowed to buy merchandise.

Those who think in terms of organizational charts are likely to divide aesthetics, functionality, and substance into separate testing regimes. As with so many other forms of business dysfunction, this misguided use of the org chart is a likely step on the path to, if not perdition, at least suboptimalism.

This is because unlike everyone inside your company, for whom the org chart might be sacrosanct, Real Paying Customers don’t care an infinitesimal fig about who reports to whom or how responsibilities are divvied up.

They (which turns into “we” when you and I go home and shop for something) just find all of the above annoying.

Annoying, that is, is for Real Paying Customers a collective gerund, not a decomposable one. Which in turn means that customer experience testing should be collective as well.

KJR’s readers are increasingly being pulled into Digital initiatives of one sort or another. If you’re among them, promote this thought process:

The customer experience is holistic. We have to pretend we are, too.

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