In the past, Ali was still everyone's first choice for shopping, and Taobao, known as "the almighty Taobao", made Ali the first in e-commerce. However, in recent years, Ali's performance has become more and more bad, and he was even briefly surpassed by Pinduoduo. This situation was reflected in the interview video of Cai Chongxin, chairman of the board of directors of Ali a few days ago, but the author believes that Ali is not smashing his own feet now, but smashing the experience culture he once had.
Today, Norway's sovereign wealth fund released a video interview between Nicolai Tangen, its chief investment officer, and Joe Tsai, co-founder and chairman of Alibaba. One of the conversations caught my attention:
Nicolai Tangen
"Now, of course, you're not the only one who sees an opportunity, Ali is now facing multiple rivalries, tell me the most serious ones you're facing. ”
Joe Tsai
"I think competitors, I can name a lot of competitors, you know them, you might invest in some of them.
"Over the past few years, when we looked internally and self-reflected, we knew that Ali was lagging behind because we had forgotten who our real customers were. Our customers are the ones who use our app to shop, and we don't give them the best experience.
So in a way, we hit ourselves in the foot and didn't really focus on creating value for users, so as part of the restructuring, we brought in a new CEO. I'm the chairman, and the CEO is 12 years younger than me. He is very user-centric and focuses on the product, interface, and user experience. This is the most important thing for us. ”
In this conversation, Tsai Chongxin was very frank about the user experience, saying that "we smashed our own feet", and it was. As an interaction designer who used to work at Alibaba, I don't know the Ali I used to know anymore. I haven't used Taobao for a few years now, and the main reason is that it is expensive and has not solved the biggest experience pain point of my user. There is also the current e-commerce activities, what allowances, expansion, full reduction, and cross-store ...... are constantly popping up Sorry, I'm going to tutor for Olympiad math and reading comprehension~. Now Ali remembers suppliers, sellers, and logistics companies, but what he forgets is what the shopping experience of shopping users is.
So I think that Ali is not smashing his own foot now, but smashing the experiential culture that he once had.
Once upon a time, in order to meet everyone's habit of using the shopping cart as a temporary storage box, Ali continued to increase the number of products added to the shopping cart under the pressure of background data. In order for everyone to buy cheap goods, the Double 11 Shopping Festival was created, which once led the shopping experience and experience innovation of the e-commerce industry.
1. Introduction to experience culture
Everyone has heard of corporate culture, which is generally composed of values, beliefs, rituals, symbols, ways of doing things, etc. The culture of experience is also part of the corporate culture, which determines how the value orientation is within the enterprise.
What is experiential culture in one sentence?
"Experience culture is a series of personal words and deeds that an enterprise adheres to the value of 'focusing on the experience of the target group' and strives to deliver an excellent experience to the target group. ”
However, the establishment of an experiential culture is a long-term process, it cannot be generated by itself, and it requires someone to devote energy to operation. In the process of establishing an experience culture, different job levels within the enterprise want to achieve different goals, so it is necessary to set experience goals in a targeted manner.
As shown in the figure below, for enterprise executives, the focus is to improve their recognition of the value of experience, which is more at the level of awareness, while for the middle level of the enterprise, it is necessary to enhance their ability to implement the experience project, and for ordinary grassroots employees, it is necessary to consolidate their ability to execute the experience project.
I think Alibaba's new CEO who is "very user-centric, focusing on products, interfaces, and user experience" is also trying to reshape Alibaba's experience culture from the executive level and in a top-down manner.
2. Experience culture is the cornerstone of excellent user experience
In a highly competitive market environment, companies expect to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers, but as organizations grow larger and more departments work to maintain consistent experience values and behaviors. However, as competition in the market intensifies, users have higher expectations for the quality of experience delivered by enterprises, which poses a huge challenge to enterprises.
In the face of such challenges, many companies have recognized the importance of building a strong in-house culture of experience. With a clear experiential culture, it is possible to create an environment within the enterprise that is conducive to the growth of experiential culture. It allows employees at all levels of the enterprise to establish unified experience values from different levels, know where the focus of work is, and encourage employees to spontaneously and continuously gain insight into the user's experience needs, carry out experience innovation, and continue to deliver excellent experience to users.
In the daily work of experience, how do we build an excellent experience culture, we can start from the following four aspects.
- Enhance experience awareness: arrange some theoretical learning about customer experience, learn the practices of industry benchmarking enterprises, and even visit benchmarking enterprises.
- Increase experiential practice: Implement experiential practice on the basis of methodological learning.
- Carry out experiential activities: commend individuals and departments who have excelled in the experience, and hold "everyone is an experiential officer" activities.
- Establish a visual cultural communication carrier: publish a weekly experience report, compile internal teaching materials, set up an experience publicity column, etc.
At the same time, the following problems should be avoided in the operation of experience culture.
1. Too much emphasis on advocacy and not on concrete actions
Don't rush into the promotion and promotion of experiential culture as soon as you come up. The establishment of experience culture must be manifested through specific behaviors, and action statements can be established to promote some typical behaviors that embody experience culture.
2. Not well integrated with the corporate culture, eager to break the old and create the new
The inevitable result of the long-term development of the enterprise is to form its own culture, which has been baptized by time and is highly recognized by the employees of the enterprise. If you take the liberty of overturning and starting over, it will definitely cause resistance from many employees, which is not conducive to the promotion of experience culture. We need to understand the existing culture of the enterprise and integrate the experience culture into the corporate culture.
3. Lack of patience for building a culture of experience
The establishment of experience culture is a gradual process, if you are in a hurry, it often leads to deformation of actions, can not get good phased results, and employees will lose confidence. The result is that the establishment of an experiential culture is half-or even fails. Therefore, we need to be patient.
4. Neglect of continuous investment in the establishment of an experiential culture
Because the establishment of an experiential culture is a very slow process, it is important not to think about short-term, quick results, and then stop investing. Companies must continue to promote a culture of experience, combining a closed loop of continuous feedback and incentives for success to continuously reinforce the value of an experience culture at the individual, team, and corporate levels.
Finally, I hope that my old employer, under the leadership of the new CEO, can once again establish a strong experience culture, and transform the old Alibaba store from a "user-centric" user-driven enterprise to an "experience-centric" experience-driven enterprise. Focus more on how the customer feels, rather than just making the product or service provided satisfy the customer.
This article was originally published by @井然 on Everyone is a Product Manager. Reproduction without the permission of the author is prohibited.
The title picture comes from a screenshot of Alibaba's official website
The views in this article only represent the author's own, everyone is a product manager, and the platform only provides information storage space services.