RACQ: Opinions don't prove anything
The Royal Automobile Club of Queensland (RACQ) provides roadside assistance, motoring services, insurance, banking, travel and solar products. Owned by more than 1.7 million members, RACQ has been going for more than 118 years. Here’s the story of their first Pretotyping experience, and what made them embed it – and Rapidly – into their innovation process.
Opinions don’t prove anything
For RACQ’s first Pretotype, the team tested whether there was a market for mobility-as-a-service, in which a customer buys a taxi ride, flight, train journey and Uber on one ticket that gets them door-to-door.
With this service successful in some parts of Europe, popular opinion within the RACQ team was that it would be a great offering for customers. But opinions don’t prove anything, and can lead you into dangerous territory full of zombie projects. Instead, you need reliable data to determine whether or not an idea is worth developing. So, we Pretotyped it.
Failure or success?
Before RACQ’s first Pretotype experiment, we ran a workshop with the team and then guided them through the experiment.
They mocked up a website offering mobility-as-a-service alongside three days of Google Ads that appeared when people looked at online flight bookings. Then, they waited to see what happened.
With zero uptake, RACQ was able to kill the mobility-as-a-service idea and saved millions by not building the wrong thing.
RACQ Chief Information Officer, Greg Booker, says Pretotyping allows you to see what customers really do when offered a new product or service, rather than just what they say they’ll do.
“If you have people who don’t know they are being watched, you get a more reliable result and you get it more quickly," Greg said.
By gathering reliable data quickly, companies are able to identify which ideas are worth investing in, and which are duds, without wasting precious time, money and energy.
Hear from our customers
“What we did learn quickly, and for little outlay, was that there was no point developing a fully-fledged service in the hope that people would come. The experiment proved that they wouldn’t. We saved a few hundred thousand dollars by stopping.”
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