Where To Start With A Startup, Part II: A Customer & Business Experience
Defining our Experience Principles
Company values allow for a lot of interpretation (i.e. misinterpretation), therefore, need to become more actionable and preferably quantifiable — especially for people who weren’t involved in their creation. To do this we then asked ourselves what these values would look like to a consumer on a day-to-day basis. If the values are what we want people to know us for, what are the daily experiences we want them to have that will reinforce this message and build loyalty and eventually, trust.
For instance; If we want our customers to think of us as Honest we should tell them where our sources come from and validate our offering.
We call these Experience Principles. When we start developing the idea into a product or service we will use these principles to guide our decisions and keep us true to our values. There will be a limitless number of decisions that need to be made over the lifetime of the business and at times it will be hard to decide between conflicting benefits to the business or the consumer. This is when we call upon our Experience Principles to guide us in the right direction and make sure we’re making our decisions based on the original purpose and core beliefs of the business. This set of principles can easily act as a checklist for future product development and allow a business to grow into several departments whilst aligning to an overarching desired customer experience.
Experience mapping
In parallel to our Experience Principles we also spend time mapping out the major touch-points and situations we consider to be influential in our intended customers lives. Of course depending on the idea this could be anything from an hourly to annual basis, regardless, it is broken down to the key moments we feel the ‘idea’ might have a part to play. An integral part of the exercise to to identify all potential scenarios so we leave no stone unturned and do our best to see that no opportunity is missed, which may well prompt some inappropriate ideas or misplaced suggestions but its all welcome at this stage. Its much better to take time to explore all potential opportunities and find an undiscovered gem than to save time not considering them because we think we don’t have a part to play.
The resulting Experience Maps would then act as a template for us to flex our creative minds and ideate over where we think the business could support, accelerate or even remove our customers from the process entirely. We highlight the pain points in our personas’ lives and where we can solve their problems. Again the remit is to go as far and wide as our minds will take us, as this will stretch the idea and stress how much we actually want the business to be responsible for. For example; if your idea is a health and fitness platform which centres around a device that track your steps, heart rate, calories, distance etc, why not offer an additional service that recommends subsequent dietary, nutritional and medical advice based on your general state of wellbeing? Now, there could be plenty of reasons why not and my top-line advice would be to know your capabilities as founders, do one thing, and do it better than anyone else — and this is still very true even when we’re mapping out the desired experience but the focus and limitations will come later. At this stage we know we have an idea and largely a market we want to target but we haven’t yet considered all the possible variables that your idea might touch, and you never know where that hidden gem that helps differentiate you might be.
Customer vs Business
Of course there is another side to our Experience Map which will have an equal effect on the success of our idea; the business itself. We must understand that although we need to think ‘customer first’ in everything we do, that does not mean the business doesn’t get a look in. The needs of our customers must drive the objectives and ambitions of the business but not at its own expense. How can our founders serve their customers in a way they’ve never experienced before if they’re not in a position to do so. The needs of the business must be aligned to the needs of the customer so they can deliver each other mutual value. This might seem obvious but with the advent of freemium services such as Uber, Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb and other companies considered to be the highest-valued startups in the world who are glorified for their customer-first approach, we can be easily forgiven for thinking “what’s best for the customer is best for the business”.
“First, a false sense of euphoria takes hold as a consumer solution is identified. Cries of ‘Consumers love my idea!’ and ‘We’ve solved it’ ring down the halls. But in truth, it’s at best half-solved.
The needs of the consumer have been addressed, but the needs of the business and the people who run it, and who ultimately decide what gets to market, have not.” — Mark Payne, Founder, Farenheit 212
To help solve this we split our Experience Map into two channels to help us understand both sides of the coin. On the top; the customer experience (this often splits into multiple user types), and on the bottom; the business experience. This helps us map the actions of the business with the actions of our customers and evaluate where our idea has strong commercial value (simple solutions with high margins) and where the idea might have lower commercial value (low impact with high cost implications) and require significant investment form the business. It’s not a case of one being right or wrong but assessing where the founders want to focus their time and money against their wider business goals.
It also allows us to see where there might be crossover in solving multiple problems (across touch-points) with a single solution on the business side. This kind of discovery could save huge amounts of investment, reduce cost and maximise profits. It could also change the entire shape of the organisation and infrastructure. An example of this might be help and support — which is widely applicable to any business idea. Before our experience map we may have assumed that there will be a support network requiring large numbers of human resource. But after we consider an exhaustive set of potential customer journeys, we found that there is an opportunity to allow our customers to support each other and supply a self generating and renewable source of support, thus considerably reducing overhead. In this instance the business investment would shift from hiring technical support to man phones lines or chat rooms, to hiring designers and developers to create a user friendly user generated community.
Set the Mood
Visualising our look and feel
Now comes the bit that gets me a little over excited. Mood boards. After we’ve aired and defined some crucial aspects of the idea such as the market expectations, value proposition, core values and customer touch-points, we’re in a position to get conceptual and theoretical. How might we evoke the sentiments of our findings into how the company could look and feel? We separate this into clear categories where, again we go far and wide. Key categories include imagery, typography, colour and tone of voice.
I’ve found the best way to extract value out of this session is to come into the workshop prepared with a wide set of examples broadly focussed on the industry and subject at hand, then gather input from our founders as to where their feelings lean towards. Using our Core Values and Experience Principles as a guide, we can then extract the general words, feelings and mood that our founders (and the rest of the group) think the business wants to portray.
Brand Perception Mapping
One of the exercises I’ve found to be helpful is brand positioning and perception mapping. This can take many forms but in this case — while we’re in the primitive stages and still not 100% sure which sector the idea actually sits — we wanted to segment by four separate verticals and select the players we think are leading both from an experience and commercial point of view. We use this as a barometer to evaluate our proposition and audience against and try to understand what it is about these companies that makes them attractive and compelling to their audience. We quickly found our (intended) place in this map, which gives our visual designer(s) what they need to start applying the visual bones to what will eventually be the brand skeleton on which to work from. This is by no means the finished article and of course we can take as many pivots as we feel necessary as the proposition develops and more crucially, as we learn what our customers respond and relate to.
