Just about every company in every industry is being sufficiently disrupted by digital technologies that they must undergo some level of digital transformation to stay in the game. In the case of Electrolux, digital transformation means a number of things – to include obvious things like adding internet connectivity to its appliances – but it mainly means figuring out how to leverage digital technologies to improve the overall experience for the customers that buy its appliances.
That’s assuming customers actually buy them. As Jaimohan Thampi, head of IoT solutions at Electrolux, explained to Disruptive.Asia co-publisher Tony Poulos on the sidelines of the recent TechXLR8 Asia event in Singapore, Electrolux now has to think about the customer experience in the context of the “sharing economy” being embraced by millennials where people are sharing rather than owning things. Think of that – how do you deliver an optimal customer experience to someone who is using your product but doesn’t own it?
Thampi talks about other key aspects of digital transformation in the appliance business – the need for digital literacy in corporate culture, developing new go-to-market models as retail channels are disrupted by e-commerce and O2O, and figuring out how to harness digital technologies to improve usage of an appliance (i.e. pointing out useful features of a steam oven for that dish you’re preparing) or after-care (i.e. telling a user when it’s time to change the water filter in the refrigerator’s ice-maker).
If nothing else, you’ll never think about daily household chores like cooking and laundry the same way again.
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