Maybe what differentiates a company in the marketplace is their attention to detail. If it’s not, maybe it should be…
Competitive differentiation is an important aspect in any industry but is often overlooked, or under invested in, amongst companies. Everyone is chasing each other to make sure no one has a competitive advantage, but far too often this means they rush past what makes them different. Being different is important and because it is important, it is hard, really hard. Unimportant things are easy, but important things are hard.
When it comes to competitive differentiation, there are a lot of ways to “skin the cat” as the saying goes. You can focus on price and be the low cost leader, you can focus on service and deliver “white glove” service, you can focus on branding and leverage emotional connections to the brand, you can focus on market segmentation, you can focus on a number of attributes that each company has to deliver and try to pick one or a few to do it differently and have that be the core of your differentiation.
Here at GCS we focus on a bunch of things, but one area we think we do really well is our attention to detail. Our software, product engineering, and support engineering teams, really want to make sure they get it right and think through as much of the internal and external application variables that they can conceive of and try to make sure that the applications, features, and functions we deliver are addressing them all.
Let’s take our iRAS product which we launched late last year, and we’ve been selling like hotcakes ever since. This application originally was going to take us 3 months to build. Unfortunately, much to the chagrin of our management team, it took us considerably longer. But that’s because our software and product engineering teams were paying so much attention to the details, the minutia that makes the product not only useful, but reliable, scalable, extensible and, therefore, guarantees that value is delivered to the customer. Paying attention to detail sounds like a nice pithy statement, but in reality, how many companies do that? How many people do that? I mean, when you think of great companies that focus on the details, who do you think of? I think of Disney, Apple, Tesla... What makes them great? Is it their products, their service, the experiences they give their customers? Yes, all of that. But what makes their products, services, and experiences great? Their attention to detail. They are obsessed about it. It is one of the key pillars that makes their products, and as a direct result their companies, great.
We certainly aren’t Apple or Disney, but we do share this obsession with attention to detail. That is one way we differentiate ourselves from our competition. We aren’t building switches, launching IVRs platforms, dabbling in SMS or voice apps. We are focused, with the intensity of a laser, on interconnect voice and that means we can focus on the details better than anyone.