Switching costs are one of the hottest topic in product management – if you can get your platform/app to a user-base that lets you unlock the full potential of network effects (where each additional user increases value to all other users more than one that came before them), then the costs of switching to another service will be almost unsurmountable. The cost, in the case of messaging apps, is the list of friends, and even businesses, that already use that platform. These costs can be so high, that it’s worth asking ourselves whether they can ever be overcome at all.
An interesting turn of events
The events of the last few days may bring this long awaited answer, as we’re witnessing a mass migration following the introduction of the new WhatsApp Terms of Service, and sparked by some tweets from public figures, in particular this one by Elon Musk, in support of competing instant messaging apps. The number of downloads for platforms such as Signal or Telegram have skyrocketed, causing both apps to top the AppStore and Play Store charts in several countries.
The reasons that are pushing customers to switch are not without merit, although (especially within the EU) the effects may not be as grave. Irrespective, many people (myself included) fear that this might open the floodgates for advertisements between chat sessions.
How do I convince my friends?
If you are having this fear, and are wondering how to convince your friends to follow you to another service, then most likely you fall into the category of the early adopters, as described in the 1991 classic Crossing the Chasm by G. Moore. The proverbial chasm here, is the one that separates you from your early majority and late majority friends.
As mentioned in the introduction, this question has been addressed before to various degrees of success. One such article can be a good starting point for our exploration – we need to address financial, procedural and relational switching costs.
We can start by disregarding financial switching costs: users are now widely accustomed to messaging apps and their services being offered for free, although this wasn’t always the case (from 2013 to 2016, WhatsApp used to charge $1/year after the first year of free trial).
Procedural switching costs
Next, we need to focus on procedural switching costs. These are related to how difficult it is for a new user to be properly set up to start getting value from your service. We can reduce the process of setting up a messaging up to two subsections:
- the onboarding experience – the team at WhatsApp have surely thrown a lot of resources into optimizing every single aspect of this procedure, and the competitors have followed suit, so there is probably little one could do to improve upon this. I can’t honestly imagine that a significant amount of users would get stuck at this step.
- migrate your group chats with all the corresponding users – many features are available in competitors’ apps to facilitate this, such as group links (which you can share in the old group to enable users to join the new group in the new service in one click), and the folks at Signal have been quick to pick this up in one of their latest posts.
Training users in this case is also not a problem, as they will most likely have already learned the ropes by using the incumbent for several years, and the competitors have wisely adopted a similar UX framework.
Still, it feels like there is one pivotal problem that is not being addressed: the migration of chat data. This could be a game changer, as many users, myself included, have been exchanging potentially important information through WhatsApp, and losing that information would certainly represent a tangible loss.
Relational switching costs
This is surely the hardest ones to overcome, and as a testament to that there is no consensus in the community onto how one would go about doing this. Surely, we can learn something from the early-adopter-migration phenomenon that we’re witnessing in this field: having a strong why around your product can gather masses to go the extra mile and proactively promote your cause.
I have already received several messages from friends, stating that they’re moving to Signal, and citing reliable articles as to why you probably should too. This is free publicity you can never hope to get without having a crystal-clear sense of purpose around your product.
We’ve established that people are willing to go to great lengths for a cause they believe in (this is not necessarily news), but what if you’re convinced, what if you’re one of those people? Well, we can look into some of the solution proposed in this forum thread – most vary from extreme to outright antisocial behavior, but we can summarize the advice as follows:
- change your WhatsApp status to “Message me on [app] or email";
- change your profile picture (even more effective) to a logo of the new app or the message above (or both);
- communicate to your most frequent contacts/groups that you will be reachable at [app];
- recreate your groups on the new app, and share a link to join;
- try to be assertive when convincing others to switch – you shouldn’t be asking them to quit WhatsApp, as that will be perceived as accusing them of being ignorant for not knowing.
As a general note, even if you’re not ready for switching over 100%, you can still help the cause by just downloading the alternatives and keeping them on your device to show to your friends that you’re also available. This user problem could also be addressed by competitors by providing users with a low-powered state of their app that requires fewer resources from the OS but still sends notifications every so often (e.g. once per day).
Will this be enough? Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but most likely the PR nightmare that the WhatsApp team is living this week will leave its marks on the future of the platform.
<sup>All opinions are my own.</sup>