Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) have adopted a strategy that they will believe is best suited to grow their customer base by approaching the customers while they are young.
The two firms believe that the best way to build a strong customer base is to grow with them from the time they are at a young age. For this reason, Alphabet and Microsoft have special software packages that they offer to their customers, particularly students and teachers. For example, anyone who starts typing using Google Docs or Microsoft Word will be more likely to use these services for the rest of their lives, if anything can be said of the future so far ahead. It is, therefore, important to start the relationship with customers at a young age and that is the idea behind Microsoft Classroom and Google Classroom offerings.
Google recently revealed an upgrade that allows teachers to automatically share a summary of a student’s performance with the parents or guardians. Parents who get an invitation from the teachers can receive daily or weekly progress summaries about the performance of their children through email. Microsoft Classroom is currently in preview but it is not clear whether it is the same feature that the company will provide. However, it might be available soon since it is in the nature of the competition to get to customers as fast as possible.
One of the spokespersons at Microsoft stated that the firm is currently collecting feedback from parents about the kind of involvement that they would prefer to have with their children’s class work. Google Apps for slideshow creation, spreadsheet, and word processing are competing with Microsoft Office and Office 365 for the same market and the only way to win over the market is to be more creative.
Such growth strategies are some of the indicators that companies have identified that getting children to adopt their tools is an advantage against their rivals. This is because the children are more likely to continue using the products that they are used to even when they are adults and that means the firms will retain their customers.
