SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU SPRING 2020 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 81
A great example is online pet store Chewy,
which I mentioned earlier. I ordered a medium
shirt from there for Romeo. He’s always taken a me-
dium. But when I put the shirt on that poor dog, he
could barely breathe. It was too tight — too many
of those chicken lollipops. So I called Chewy, and I
said, “I’d like to return my medium for a large,” and
the woman said, “Nope, that’s not how we’re going
to do it today.” She said, “Give your medium to a
friend of yours, and we’ll send you a large for free.”
Chewy gives its customer service reps a discre-
tionary budget to create opportunities to build
goodwill with customers, and this empowerment
allows for a customer experience that feels seam-
less. Obviously, this worked out great for me: I
didn’t have to do the return, I didn’t have to do any
paperwork, and Romeo got a shirt that fit. And it
worked out really well for his friend, Woodford,
who now has a new free shirt.
What I like about this model is that Chewy’s
costs to acquire Woodford as a future customer
were very low, right? I got Woodford for them.
Chewy didn’t have to spend very much to do it. And
the total lifetime value of Romeo is now very high.
Experience disrupters know how incredibly
significant it feels for customers when there’s a
genuine change in the power balance in post-sale
interactions. A friend of mine got herself all worked
up before calling her cellphone company about
something she thought was a mischarge on her
bill — a situation most of us have been through
with a phone company or cable provider — antici-
pating yet another interaction that would go badly.
She hung up in near disbelief just a few minutes
later when the customer service rep believed her,
fixed the billing charge while they were on the
phone, and offered her a courtesy credit for the hassle.
There is unbelievable value in this adaptation.
THESE EXPERIENCE DISRUPTERS really are a
different species. They think differently, and the
founders have a healthy disdain for conventional
wisdom. They spend hardly any of their energy
extracting value from their customers. Instead, they
spend all their energy thinking, “How do I add
value for my customers?” They’re really good at this
stuff. One last time: How they sell is why they win.
Here’s a summary of the five points:
- Don’t obsess completely about product-market fit.
Obsess about experience-market fit. Embrace your
inner Carvana. - Remember that dollars flow where the friction is
low. Mechanically remove friction. Automate like
the superheroes at Atlassian. - Personalize, personalize, personalize. Stop em-
bracing automation without personalization —
that’s what people call spam. Think like Netflix.
Dust for fingerprints. - Sell through your customers, not just to them. Let
Glossier be your model. - Rethink how customers get treated after the sale.
Look at your terms and conditions. Give your
customer-facing employees the tools to make
things right. Delight people, the way Chewy does.
I started this article talking about my nightly
routine. Routines can be good. But they can also
hold you back.
You have routines in your job, and when you fin-
ish reading this, you’re going to return to whatever it
is that you do. You have a choice. You can do your
normal routine: Drag the spreadsheet on your career,
drag the spreadsheet on your company. Or you can
set out on a new course, a more exciting one. Stop
meeting your customer needs, and start exceeding
them. Choose to become an experience disrupter.
Brian Halligan (@bhalligan) is CEO of HubSpot, a
customer experience software platform for growing
businesses. He’s a coauthor of Inbound Marketing:
Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online
(John Wiley & Sons, 2014). This article was adapted
from Halligan’s keynote speech at HubSpot’s
Inbound 2019 event. Comment on this article at
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/61314.
REFERENCES- J.J. Roberts, “IBM Tops 2018 Patent List as AI and
Quantum Computing Gain Prominence,” Fortune,
Jan. 7, 2019, https://fortune.com. - D. Muller, “Carvana Debuts as No. 8 on Used Ranking,”
Automotive News, April 22, 2019, http://www.autonews.com. - L. Smiley, “Stitch Fix’s Radical Data-Driven Way to Sell
Clothes — $1.2 Billion Last Year — Is Reinventing Retail,”
Fast Company, Feb. 19, 2019, http://www.fastcompany.com.
Reprint 61314. For ordering information, see page 4.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020.
All rights reserved.
Embrace
these five
experience
disrupter
plays and
harness
your inner
superhero.