This year Cobone celebrates 13 years of bringing the best value offers to our consumers across Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And over those 13 years, our customers have saved more than SAR13 billion. If Marie Kondo had designed the math herself, it couldn’t have been neater.
Bringing value to our consumers is core to everything we do, and it’s a sentiment that resonates culturally across all demographics in this region; men and women of all ages, interests and income levels, local and expat, resident and tourist. Our consumers understand that we all have what we have, and why wouldn’t we want it to stretch further? Adding to that pretty straight-forward mantra, the road to improving our CX is continuously developing on two fast-changing frontiers – vast improvements globally in tech capabilities and significant local consumer industry disruption.
Through developments in technology, essentially we are better able to understand who are our customers and how to segment, hyper-personalise and geo-target our services to meet their needs. This increased understanding is an ongoing voyage of discovery and fundamental to underpinning the
relevance of our brands.
As we have further developed our own SaaS b2b services, so we are unlocking opportunities to reach new and varied, highly-targeted market sectors and to tailor for them unique portfolios of curated offers, specific for those groups. We want our customer experience to be the best from first interaction through
to purchase and on to retention. A key tenet of our growth strategy requires challenging internally how we operate, driving change across all functions to bring continuous incremental improvement.
AI is an exciting new tool to be leveraged across our internal site services and digital connections with business partners. As an industry, we are just beginning to explore the disruptive implications. As with all aspects of this digital economy, change is the only constant.
In terms of products and services for consumers, Cobone currently operates in the discretionary spend sector of the economy. The lifestyle of our amazing cities doesn’t come cheap and most of the working population exercise a high marginal propensity to consume essential goods and services. As the cities grow, our service to ever-increasing numbers of residential customers, is to help them get the best from their experience of living here. Discretionary spending is finite but choices are not. Our challenge is to present to our customers a broad range new and interesting options, not only to enjoy everyday life at great value, but also to put before them a wide range of experiences, goods and services for the special days, times spent with friends and family, gifts and indulgences.
At the same time “The Rise of the Tourist” has enormous implications for us all. Huge, visionary re-positioning has brought to the UAE, and now is bringing to Saudi Arabia a global market, forming a foundation for on-going growth across all industries operating in the region for decades to come. We have seen in the UAE the impact on residents, local and expat, as changes bring opportunities, jobs, wealth and prosperity, whilst the hotels, f&b and activities industries clamour to meet the tourist dollar opportunity arising. The implication for Cobone is simple - to continue to identify, reach and understand this new, growing customer base and work closely with our business partners to market to them relevant services and offers.
The business and the industries in which we operate have seen significant change over the past 13 years but one key tenet of the model has not changed since inception. For this business to be sustainable we have to operate on terms of business that offer a tri-part win win win, for Cobone naturally, but equally for our business partners and central to everything, for our customers.
Source: ME Digital Group
