Customers value specialisation
Many service providers tout "one stop shopping" capabilities, but many customers prefer a la carte purchasing so they only pay for what they need. Cross-selling creates cost efficiencies and synergies that often benefit the business, not the customer.
The fact you provide in-home water treatment systems and comprehensive bathroom design services is irrelevant when a customer just needs a plumber to fix a leak.
Seeing commoditisation as an opportunity
Process control and automation have turned many skilled professions into commodities.
Services like web design, accounting, legal services and medicine are all encountering commoditisation to varying degrees. Not because those professionals aren't highly skilled, but because customers can often receive similar levels of quality and service from a variety of sources. Are some service providers better than others? Absolutely - but to many customers, "good" is sufficient for their needs.
Use the trend towards commoditisation to your advantage. In some cases, instead of trying to be the “best” solution in an overall sense, it might be enough to just be the best solution for specific needs. For work outside your specialisation, some of this might be suited to outsourcing to the growing numbers of highly-skilled people eager to work on-demand (Then you and the freelancer both win – and so do your customers).
Customer perception of quality differs
Until the arrival of services like Uber, it might have been reasonable to assume that consumers would only be willing to ride in traditional taxis. The market has shown that this is not the case –customers are willing to try something new to provided that concerns like safety, reliability and price are met.
Quality is always in the eye of the customer. And in a world full of emerging disruptive players like Uber, it’s time to step outside business as usual, think about what customers truly value, then find creative ways to provide that to customers.
If you don’t innovate and disrupt, chances are someone else will. And in this day and age, it will probably be sooner rather than later.
