A Simple Way to Think of "Experience" Through a Jobs-to-be-Done Lens

Practical Jobs-to-be-Done Series

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Have you ever been in the room when someone suggested designing immersive experiences for a gas or electric utility? I have. While an extreme example, there are other products on the market that are essentially utilities (even if they won’t admit it). Just ask their customers and you’ll find out. You can also look for characteristic behaviors of the provider such as competing solely on price and giveaways.

Who wants to compete on price? No one. But, we see it happen every day and we keep seeing it. Customers know that the product is only a small piece of a larger puzzle that they need to piece together. For example, electricity does not light your home. Natural gas does not heat your home. Both are simply fuel sources for other products and infrastructure that must also be in place to get these jobs done.

That’s why utilities compete on price. We’re not stupid. We know we have to spend even more money to get the underlying job done because the other pieces to the puzzle are not free. In fact, they can be quite expensive!

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Most utilities simply can’t see beyond what they have currently operationalized. They provide a service that requires constant attention because things break, natural disasters occur which interrupt service, and customers complain. We all know this drill.

This inability to see beyond their core business model is not unique to utilities, we can see it happening at any company. They all (or their current products) come and go. The type of utility I’ll use in my example will only be disrupted by a cost-effective and high-performance alternative energy source, but there are other products that are considered utilities that are closer to being disrupted. Let’s not talk about that, though.

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When a designer at a utility gets the urge to design an experience, go-ahead and ask them if they believe customers want more friction in the service. Where I come from, experiences are things I want to remember. They are immersive. I go to Disney World for experiences but I don’t got to Disney World to experience the food service. I expect services like that to be seamless and invisible. If they’re not, it detracts from the experience it’s ultimately supporting.

The primary experience you will remember with a service provider is a bad experience.

The desire to create experiences really comes from the desire to grow the business, believing that engagement will lead to the revenue that is desired. The problem is that most consumers do not care about their electric provider and do not want to engage with them until the service fails. At that point, smiles won’t help, a coffee bar in a waiting room they will never visit won’t help, and an online community will go from zero engagement to massive enragement!

So what could a hypothetical electric utility do to a) find revenue growth (if they’re allowed to) and/or b) find an experience consumers will value? First, let’s find out what consumers are trying to get done when they hire a utility’s service. Pretend I just ran a survey with electric utility customers and learned how they rank the jobs that electricity enables in their lives:

1. Light their home

2. Run their appliances

3. Watch/listen to entertainment

4. Work from home

I know, I’m a rocket scientist! But the question I’m going to raise here (barring any regulatory issues, which do exist) is what if an electric utility could help get these jobs done?

What if a utility sold their core product but also bundled some other things with it? Remember, the companies selling these other products would not be able to go out and bundle electricity into their portfolio. How about...

• Bundle electricity and smart light bulbs as a service. For a nominal, tiered bump in service price the consumers choose from sets of programmable smart light bulbs for free. If they burn out (which is less likely with LED bulbs) the provider replaces them as long as the as consumer is still a subscriber. Maybe an app used to manage them detects these circumstances and has them delivered automatically?

• Bundle electricity and common home appliances as a service. For a monthly fee you get free appliances, free maintenance/service and free replacement. They’d take a good-sized chunk out of the home warranty business and probably attract a lot of consumers who have never even thought about purchasing a home warranty.

Experiential things can be embedded into these services. For example, they could design better learning programs to teach people how to set up a better lighting program, or how to keep their washing machine smelling fresh. Then there is also something to be said about the emotions people will experience when they realize they don’t need to come up with $1000 for a new washing machine when theirs tanks on them for good.

Perhaps they get a message in their app to select from a number of possible delivery and installation dates…without having to do a thing because the network notified the utility, or a service engineer took care of doing it while on site.

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To sum this up, for any product that is in a mature life stage, or has become somewhat commoditized, you might find that it’s actually a platform (or a component of it is) that is being used to enable many higher-order jobs-to-be-done. If you can identify and prioritize these jobs you can focus additional research to dig deeper into those jobs to understand where people struggle.

At the end of the day, people want to get as much of a job done on a single platform as possible. They don’t want to…

• sign-up for service with a power company, and

• separately purchase a washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator, and

• separately arrange for service for a malfunctioning appliance, and

• separately maintain an inventory of light bulbs, and

• separately replace a broken or non-working smart light bulb

…and maybe even…

• separately purchase laundry detergent and/or dishwashing detergent and/or water filters for a refrigerator

I could go on. Do you remember about 10 years ago when everyone was talking about Rolls Royce designing a new service for the airlines, where with a subscription (called Power-by-the-Hour)¹ they got jet engines for the plane, as well as regular service to make sure they kept running. I wonder why they did that? Maybe it helped airlines get more of the job done on a single platform, which allowed Rolls Royce to increase the value of them as well.

I intend to expand this topic beyond this example in the future, but has this been helpful?

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1. (2) The Subscription Economy: did it start with Power-by-the-Hour? | LinkedIn