You’re in a cab, stuck in traffic. Horns are blarin’ and you’re convinced this cab ride will last the rest of your life. The TV screen attached to the credit card machine plays the same 30-second clip of a sitcom for the 5th time. By the end of the ride, you can recite every word.
The lack of an entertaining, customizable customer experience is the opportunity that Uber and Spotify realized and leveraged to create better experiences for their consumers.
Uber’s cab-ordering app is growing exponentially because people want rides on-demand. Not only do they want their rides on-demand, they want their experiences to be completely customized to their personal liking. Uber now delivers on both fronts. The company already holds a strong competitive advantage over traditional taxis, so the added benefit of playing a personalized playlist through a paid Spotify Premium account sweetens the deal. Uber’s constant desire to enhance the customer experience allows it to keep thriving in an industry once monopolized by taxis.
Spotify already attracts listeners at home, at work and on the go. But the new partnership allows the company to address a weakness that Uber, and taxis in general, have – lackluster audio control in a cab. Since Spotify has over 15 million paid users and over 60 million active users, the partnership provides a huge opportunity for Uber to push its comparatively smaller customer base up and out of the six-figure range.
The next time you have a pain point, consider a partnership. Look outside of your business to create something new and unexpected – something your customers want, but you can’t provide on your own. Now that’s smart.