Yes, you read that right, Vuja de, not Déjà vu. What’s Vuja de?I am sure you are familiar with Deja vu, that strong feeling you’ve been here or experienced something before. Vuja de is the total opposite, it is the feeling you get when you look at familiar situations or everyday things as if you were seeing it for the first time. It allows you to see your business with fresh eyes and what you see might surprise you.
This is an essential task in business. The ability to reassess the status quo and challenge the established way of doing things. Another way of looking at this is to always be looking for incremental improvement in everything you do.
Lots of small changes can add up to significant change, this is very common in high-performing sports athletes and teams, but it can be applied in business too.
At some point in every business growth journey, you will hit what seems to be an insurmountable hurdle. For many businesses that focus on the need to develop new products, new services, new customers, it’s always new, new new! But what happens when the ideas run out?
But actually, looking again at your current business and focussing on innovation and improvement may have a far bigger impact, than the search for uniquely new ideas.
Take a Fresh Look at the Familiar
Vuja de – Taking a fresh look at the familiar— your products, your services, your work processes and trying to look at them with fresh eyes. Try to see them as a new customer would. Do you see outdated methods, unmet needs or untapped opportunities to deliver more?
It’s not uncommon for businesses to become too focussed on what they are doing that they lose sight of why they are doing it. A key question every business should ask regularly is: What customer need are they solving and how is that need evolving? Is your current solution to the problem still the best one? Or will new technology, or new thinking allow your solution to evolve and be even better?
Keeping a close eye on your target customer and how their need evolves is essential for business success. In short, customers are never happy, deliver them a shiny new product or service and they’ll be happy for a short period of time, but then their requirements will evolve, and they will think up of something else that they want from you. If you don’t deliver, they will look elsewhere
So adopting the concept of Vuja de allows you to regularly see your business with fresh eyes and potentially head off problems before they occur, continuing your business growth.
Vuja De – See Your Business with Fresh Eyes
Of course, you don’t need to do this alone. Working with an external consultant can also deliver the same results. Having a fresh pair of eyes, especially a pair, with experience across multiple sectors, review your business, can provide unique insight and stimulus to change, that your business will benefit from.
I will give you example of a company that failed to keep close to their customers, and how this lack of understanding led to a decline in business that they seemed unable to stop.
I worked closely with this business for several years. It was a fantasy sports game that worked off a freemium model.
If you are not sure what freemium means, this is a game revenue model, where most players play the game for free, in return for limited functionality and/or resources, and a more limited gaming experience.
A significant percentage of players choose to pay for the premium experience, additional functionality et cetera. This premium subscription revenue funds the game for everybody.
This game company had a very active premium paying audience, some of whom were very vocal in a community forum, about how they wanted the game to be developed, new features and functionality etc.
Throughout the year, the game developers spent most of their efforts developing this new functionality, requested by the premium players and spent limited time on the rest of the game, usually only when something was broken.
The end result of this was that for the majority of players, little changed in the game. For the premium players, a regular rollout of new features, was driven by the vocal minority engaging with the developers.
Over time this led to a widening gap between the free game and the premium game, with an extended range of additional features unavailable to the free players.
What the business failed to understand was that as the free game failed to evolve, the engagement level declined and the number of free players that might choose to become paying players also declined. The game was slowly dying.
Reversing the player decline
When I first got involved, I asked to see any statistics they had on the actual usage of the new premium features when they were launched. Unsurprisingly, we discovered that that the majority of the premium features were not actually being used by the majority of premium players.
In addition to this, the premium service only had one price point, i.e. you either paid or you did not pay. I challenged this binary model and explored the opportunity to have different levels of premium service for different price points.
We carried out detailed market research amongst existing and new potential players, looking at all the premium features and their propensity to use and pay for them.
The analysis resulted in the features being bundled into different packages: Bronze, Silver and Gold. It also showed that by bundling the most commonly used premium features into a low-cost premium package – Bronze, we should generate more revenue, with more people signing up and moving from the free plan.
Don’t get me wrong, this business had been trying to keep a close eye on their customers and evolve the game experience to suit their needs. Unfortunately, they had only been listening to the vocal minority and hadn’t taken time to listen to the broader group of players.
As a result of the changes we made, revenue was boosted significantly, and free player feedback also improved. All as a result of Vuja de – See your business with fresh eyes.
Could your business benefit from a business review? We offer three different levels of review starting at £1,500 for an initial overview review. This initial review can be completed quickly and deliver real insight into your business. Our more detailed reviews take more time and need more input from you and your team. All of our reviews start with the introductory package, so you can easily choose to move to a more comprehensive review, once that is completed.
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