CONFERENCE REPORT
“And the big paradox in phase
three of digital, for you, it should become more complex, for me as your customer life should become easier than ever before. “I think here there is one absolute necessity that is asking you this very simple question, we have people here from the DIY industry, from different parts of the world, but I think there is a common ground between all of your customers. Think about this, what is the scarcest resource that all of your customers have these days? It’s time. “My question to all of you is, how laser-focused are you on saving the time of your customers, with everything that you do? Is there someone at the table who is asking the question: ‘are we saving time for our customers?’
“And, the whole thing is, in this world of automation, we can play with this, we can create faster than real time servicing, where you anticipate, we can create hyper- personalised services, we can create the most convenient user interfaces that the world has ever seen.”
Behind the times
“The bad news is that the experts that are playing this game, are the biggest platforms in the world, if you ask me the real experts are the Chinese technology players, the Chinese platforms, I’m so impressed with what they do. “Two weeks ago I was in China
at Tencent, one of the biggest technology companies in China together with Alibaba. Tencent is the proud owner of WeChat, and sometimes in the West people refer to WeChat as the Facebook or the WhatsApp of China, I call that western arrogance, because these guys are light-years ahead with what we have with Facebook or WhatsApp.”
“Basically WeChat is a transactional platform that will do everything now, from selling your house or financial services, to professional private communication, and it’s like the operating system of China. If you happen to get business cards here [at the Global DIY Summit], you will see that, usually, they don’t
have an email address on it but a barcode on it to scan to WeChat, the only reason why Chinese people need email is to communicate with all the others who live in the old world,” he laughs. Mr Belleghem shares an anecdote with the audience, displaying just how advanced China is in terms of using technology both in communication and as a transactional platform: “Last year in China, I went to a shopping mall and I saw a Haagen-Dazs store, and I was with Peter Hinssen, and I said ‘Peter, I will pay’ and I took out my credit card and gave it to the lady, and she looked at me as if I was trying to buy an ice cream and was attempting to use two goats to pay or something. “Anyway, I tried to swipe the card and it didn’t work, so Peter said ‘No problem, I have cash’, so he grabbed his wallet took out the money and gave it to the Chinese lady, and the Chinese people that were waiting in line behind us started to take pictures of us!
“That was a humbling experience.
Here we are, 12 months later, now cash doesn’t work anymore, so you need to hire someone who can do the payments for you if you’re from Europe or the US and you want to buy something in Shanghai.” “Time for the good news,” Mr Belleghem says. “I meet more and more companies that grew up in traditional industries that learned how to claim these benefits, MediaMarkt is a fantastic example. “The guiding star is not technology, the guiding star is the best possible customer experience and then they reverse-engineer it to what they can do today.
“And, this is my invitation to all of you – you are all working really hard to create a valuable tomorrow for your organisation and there are two ways to do that: you can take what you have and improve that a little bit, or you can dare to dream about the day after tomorrow and reverse-engineer it back to today and start working with that. This way you do not have to predict the future, you can create your own.”
www.diyweek.net
24 AUGUST 2018 DIY WEEK 11
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