Technology growth and integration have changed where and how consumers choose to receive products or services. For example, e-commerce has made shopping easier and improved delivery in areas such as grocery delivery, access to overseas products and affordability. Companies that do this well have capitalised on the need for convenience and turned it into a product.
At first glance, many businesses have turned their services into a tangible product. To do this properly, you need to leverage technology and analytics to determine what is working for your customers and how you can provide convenience.
In this article, we look at convenience as a product. We also provide real-world examples thereof and suggest steps to implement convenience for your customers.
What Is Convenience-as-a-Product?
Convenience-as-a-Product is a business strategy that treats frictionless ease, speed, and seamless access as the core value of an offering rather than a secondary feature. In many cases, this type of strategy involves providing customers with a frictionless user experience (UX). This removes all unnecessary steps, cognitive effort, and wait times so users can complete a goal instantly.
Real-World Examples of Frictionless Productions
Here are some examples of companies that added convenience for their customers.
Uber: The entire payment step is invisible. Riders simply exit the vehicle upon arrival, and the fare is charged automatically in the background without pulling out a wallet or card.
Amazon 1-Click Ordering: Customers buy items instantly using pre-saved payment and shipping details, eliminating multi-step checkout forms.
Amazon Go: Cashier-less physical convenience stores allow shoppers to walk in, pick up items off the shelf, and walk out without scanning items or waiting in a payment line.
Checkers Sixty60: Checkers compressed the entire grocery shopping journey into a three-tap checkout with dynamic, real-time inventory tracking (preventing the frustration of out-of-stock items). The app leverages location-based algorithms to dispatch heavily optimised motorbike drivers, reliably delivering groceries in under 60 minutes.
Capitec: Capitec built a low-data and zero-rated architecture. Their official app does not consume a customer’s personal data plan. Furthermore, recognising that smartphone storage constraints force many low-income users to delete apps, they introduced comprehensive conversational banking via WhatsApp alongside their USSD menus.
PayShap: PayShap built a real-time, low-cost interbank rail. Its core UX breakthrough is ShapID, which allows users to register their mobile phone number as their banking identifier. Sending money to a friend or paying an informal trader now requires nothing more than entering their cell phone number into any banking app.
These are a few examples of how innovation breeds convenience for customers.
Steps to Provide Convenience to Customers
To take advantage of people gravitating towards buying products, service providers should consider taking the following steps.
Step 1: Niche Down
The first step is to narrow your focus to a single type of customer. Many people feel uncomfortable with this stage – especially when you need more customers, not less. It’s counterintuitive, but the first critical move in turning your service into a product is niching down because services can be adapted and customised for a variety of customers. In contrast, products need to fit one type of buyer.
Picking one niche helps you develop a great product and efficiently reach potential customers through things like social media platforms. Niche down further than you’re comfortable, then niche down some more. Consider:
- Demographics: (age, gender, income)
- Firmographics (company size, industry)
- Life stage (just married, retirement)
- Company life stage (start-up, mature, etc.)
- Psychographics (internal drivers like values, beliefs and lifestyle)
Step 2: Rank Your Services
Once you’ve niched down more than what feels comfortable, the next step in turning your service into a product is to identify the services you offer. Ask which are teachable to employees and valuable to customers with a recurring need for it. This is called finding your TVR.
List all your services for the niche you selected in step one. Then score each service on a scale of 1 to 10 on how easily you can teach it to employees, how valuable it is to your niche and how frequently they need to buy it.
Step 3: Get Clear on the Problem You Are Solving
Be clear about what problem your product solves for your niche. For example, Checkers Sixty60 makes grocery shopping easier through a simple and secure app. This makes it easier for people who work in-office to go to work and still do grocery shopping without going to a shopping centre or mall.
Step 4: Brand It
With a service, you’re typically hiring a person; with a product, you’re selling a thing. Unlike people who have names, the convenience you offer to your customers must have its own brand.
Step 5: Pre-empt Objections
When selling a service, you have the luxury of hearing your prospect’s objections first-hand, and you can dynamically address them on-the-spot. When selling a product, you don’t have the benefit of a person to overcome objections, so consider what potential objections customers might have and pre-empt them.
Step 6: Set Your Pricing
You will need to set a price for your added convenience offering. This can be anything from a delivery fee, subscription prices or tiered pricing. Your pricing depends on your customer’s buying power and how much it costs you to add this convenience.
Step 8: Manufacture Scarcity
With product businesses, you need to give people a reason to act today rather than tomorrow. This means you need to manufacture a reason to act through things like limited-time offers, limited-access products, etc.
Providing convenience as a product requires thorough planning and investing in technologies that can help you provide convenience effectively.
