Experience design: How to use a value flow to improve customer experience
In the pursuit of attracting, serving, and retaining customers, organisations have invested billions into crafting seamless experiences that curate and oversee a network of touchpoints to collectively shape the customer experience across both digital and physical realms. However, research has highlighted an interesting trend: customers are quite indifferent to these extensive efforts. Instead, their main need is having a consistent brand experience where interactions fluently flow into different channels and touchpoints.
By using a ‘value flow’ we map out brand opportunities, consumer needs and business objectives, a powerful tool that shapes the foundation for the business, to align internally and to ensure that the functional and emotional needs of customers remain at the heart of innovation. The main challenge for organisations is to offer a consistent brand and customer experience. ‘Only 18% of companies use their brand as the base for their customer experience’ (Forrester, ‘The Convergence Of Brand, Customer Experience, And Marketing’). By mapping out interactions that play a role in shaping the perception of a brand, the value flow extends beyond isolated touchpoints and aims to create a seamless and memorable experience across multiple channels and stages of interaction.
The main benefits of a value flow
By using ‘value flows’ we enable teams to create a visual representation of the customer journey, making it easier for teams to communicate and understand the various touchpoints and interactions that contribute to the overall experience. This shared understanding fosters better communication and alignment across teams. It maps out how to define the business needs, approach innovation in a customer-centric way and reveals opportunities that can be validated by product concepts.
Defining the business needs with cross-functional collaborations
Improving the overall experience requires collaboration across various departments within a company, such as operations, marketing, design, and finance. By fostering cross-functional collaboration, companies can break down silos and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals to deliver an exceptional customer experience. No surprise here that it takes several workshops to have all stakeholders together from different disciplines and departments to create this essential cross-functional collaboration.
By mapping out the entire journey, ‘value flows’ help identify;
- Bottlenecks and gaps. Like misalignments with the needs and objectives of the consumer compared to the business objectives. This insight is crucial for making informed decisions about improvements and innovations that enhance the overall experience.
- Redundancies in organisational processes. This enables companies to streamline their operations, optimise processes, and eliminate elements that negatively impact the customer experience.
- Improves communication. By illustrating how each team’s actions contribute to the customer experience
Innovation in a customer-centric way
Brands are constantly using the same customer insights and a similar ‘customer centric’ approach, resulting in a decline in distinction when it comes to service & experience solutions. Understanding people might not sound as intricate as rocket science, but it stands as one of the most formidable yet rewarding undertakings for innovations that can significantly impact your organisation’s success.
The value flow integrates various services, including digital touchpoints, physical interactions, and human interactions. By unifying this, companies create a holistic view of the journey, which reveals all gaps, pain points, and opportunities in the journey. This involves the understanding of the stages a customer goes through from awareness to post-purchase interactions and a deep understanding of how the product or service and brand fit into a single consumer’s life.
Revealing opportunities
To define the future experience of the brand and how they can excel within a competitor landscape, mapping out opportunity spaces is crucial. A value flow ensures that every interaction a customer has with a brand is; consistent, coherent, and aligned with the company’s strategy, values and promises. This cohesion enhances brand perception, loyalty and trust, leading to increased customer satisfaction and retention. These opportunities spaces are then prioritised and created into product concepts to quickly validate and improve the experience before we start with the design process.
The product concepts are created to understand if it is a viable solution;
- Does it create value for the organisation and the brand? It can challenge long-held assumptions. Designing a product concept can help you understand your users better and use what they dream of as a solution. This will enforce a change in strategy or could potentially save or earn millions in revenue. Often because of a lack of understanding of what is really needed to enhance the overall experience.
- Do customers need it (not just want it) and if they would practically use it over an alternative? To decipher what actually matters to users we need to understand why your product matters in their lives. Indi Young calls this the problem space. It’s where you can start building a systemic view of how your product impacts a user’s life, it’s also where you can start imagining dream scenarios for solving their problem. Sometimes our goal should be to create magic by imagining a new future full of possibilities.
Creating the brand experience foundation for Odido
TMobile NL relaunched as Odido in September 2023. At code d’azur we focused on the business transformation of the new brand, and how this could impact their current consumer base whilst simultaneously attracting new customers. What is Odido’s unique offering and how should they communicate and translate this to consumers? An offering that made sense to Odido and their goals, but which wasn’t necessarily the proposition the consumer was waiting for or could simply understand. To transform their business needs into something tangible and valuable for the consumer we set-up the following:
Immersive workshops
To truly understand the new brand and its proposition, the experience team hosted several collaborative workshops with the key stakeholders from Odido. To create the foundation of an accurate value flow, we needed to define the brand experience foundation and simultaneously focus on mapping out the value flow’s opportunities spaces.
With the main consumer journey mapped out, we continued by facilitating workshops to shape the value flow. Through an empathy mapping exercise, we validated personas and the main business goals for Odido based on value proposition against the journey phases. With this input we were able to create core scenarios for the personas which covered 90% of the user cases for the new brand. These scenarios supported the value flow and helped identify the gaps that we needed to focus on. The main opportunity spaces were validated with Odido, and with ideation sessions with the use of an enabler canvas tool (identifies low-hanging fruit) we generated ideas based on the opportunity phases.
Product concept prototypes to validate assumptions
We named the ideas within the opportunity spaces ‘Moments of Meaning’ — the core moments that can make a difference in the overall experience and can differentiate Odido from her competitors. The ‘Moments of Meaning’ that were defined in the workshops, were used to create prototypes to define and sharpen the ambition and brand perception of Odido. These were then added to the ‘brand experience playbook’, as a foundation for the user experience. The brand experience playbook is a guideline for the brand to stay innovative and to ensure alignment and consistency. It evokes stakeholders to think big, without losing track of the objectives of the consumers and shows how the new offering and brand can differentiate whilst truly making a difference in the life of the consumers.
A value flow isn’t just a tool
It’s a compass guiding you toward the convergence of brand, customer and organisational needs. Beyond that, a value flow serves as a unifying force that brings individuals from various corners of the organisation together, aligning their efforts toward enhancing the overarching customer experience.
Some organisations might struggle to decipher the map due to the complexity and depth of information. Embrace the practice of co-creation workshops, where the map becomes more than a diagram. It transforms into a catalyst for systems thinking, driving the generation of novel ideas and concepts in collaboration with clients and consumers. This approach ensures that the resulting ideas comprehensively account for customers and their intricate interactions within the expansive ecosystem of channels, touchpoints, and spaces. Simultaneously, it instils stakeholders with a sense of confidence that the strategies born from their collective efforts will seamlessly benefit both customers and the organisation.
In the modern business landscape, value flows stand as a powerful tool for creating outstanding customer experiences. By investing in value flows and embracing the principles of service design, companies may elevate their customer-centric strategies, foster collaboration, and create a competitive advantage that truly sets them apart in the market.
Written by Sarah Bui & Fiona van Schaik — Experience design at code d’azur
