Creating Differentiated Experiences
It’s a common challenge. Companies want to realize a new product or service, or want to improve their existing customer experience, but aren’t sure how to deliver a truly differentiated experience. They ask themselves:
“What are the special ingredients that will truly make us stand out to customers? How can we ensure that they are infused into every customer touch-point, and serve as a ‘north star’ for the products and services we deliver?”
This was the question that Ryan Ferguson asked of his own start-up, Advanced Environmental Group (AEG). His service is focused on delivering a great experience to users who want to make a positive impact through composting (to read more about his concept, go to OpenIDEO).
Last month, EPAM led a two hour workshop with alumni of the Stanford LEAD program to help Ryan define his differentiation, and begin translating that into product and service features. The meet-up was organized by EPAM’s Stanford LEAD alumnus Pavel Azaletskiy. The workshop was hosted in EPAM’s San Francisco studio and led by Jonathan Lupo (VP Experience Design), and Nick Bazley (Director). Together, Jonathan and Nick guided the group through a handful of activities that helped Ryan quickly get to the heart of his service differentiation.
Part 1: Experience Principle Creation (Brand Positioning Activity)
Experience principles serve as both inspiration as well as the guardrails that help make a differentiated experience possible. In order for an organization to make considered choices around what principles matter most to their business, EPAM recommends that companies look both internally at their inherent values, as well as externally to see where they can best position themselves in the market to bring the most value.
Activity #1: Looking Inward — Inherent Values
To help Ryan look inward at his company’s core values, Jonathan asked him to give a 15 minute overview of his vision. As Ryan got up to the whiteboard and began sketching the key components of his business, the EPAM design team listened carefully and began documenting key words, themes, and insights onto post-it notes. For example, while Ryan described his vision of compost bins that could collect weight data to display via an app, Jonathan jotted down “Smart,” to describe the intelligent nature of the compost bin.
The more Ryan spoke about his concept, the more post-its the team was able to cluster into emerging themes. When Ryan was done, the group paused this activity. Instead of finalizing the themes, it was time to look through another important lens: the outward focus.
Activity #2: Looking Outward — Market Positioning
To discover where Ryan’s service could add the most value in the marketplace, Jonathan introduced a second activity, in which he walked the group through multiple value dimensions. These dimensions, listed below, were developed by the EPAM design team in advance of the workshop based on an understanding of the marketplace in which Ryan’s business would sit:
- Tangible Product “a thing” vs. A Service
- Focus on Individual Contribution vs. Group Contribution
- Budget vs. Premium
- Self Service vs. Full Service/Concierge
The team had identified four relevant competitors in the environmental conservation market, which included two competitors focused on compost bin products, and two focused on carbon credit services:
Workshop attendees were divided into teams; each focused on a different competitor. After reviewing a competitor one-pager and discussing internally, the teams placed their company in a position along each of the dimensions and explained their rationale to the larger group.
Once all of the competitors were mapped on the whiteboard, the key trends became apparent. There was a big difference between product-focused companies offering compost bins, and service-oriented companies offering carbon credit tracking and trading. This showed Ryan that there was a unique opportunity in the marketplace for his concept to combine his product with an overarching service, and also for his business to find a niche area across related dimensions. For example, he saw the potential to have a greater focus on group impact, premium appeal, and a full service/concierge experience; offering a different value proposition than other compost bin retailers.
This activity generated a lot of excitement and questions from workshop participants. Here were two questions asked, as well as the EPAM team’s responses:
Question: “Do you always use the same dimensions when you do this activity?”
Response: No, in fact crafting these dimensions is an important activity which should be based on an assessment of competitors and key emerging trends in the marketplace. Another great way to inform these dimensions is to do primary customer research, so that they are informed by key user needs.
Question: “Should companies always seek to be in a white-space area, where there are no other competitors along the dimensions? Isn’t there a risk that your business would offer something customer’s aren’t used to, or that you’d miss out on offering value that’s clearly working for other competitors?”
Response: The most opportunity for differentiation lies in the white-space areas, however there is no steadfast rule that your business should only sit in the white-space across all dimensions. In some cases, even a small push along just one spectrum can mean big differentiation to customers. Finding the right positioning is more of an art than a science, and decisions should be made with both customer needs and internal values in mind.
Activity #3: Experience Principles
After helping Ryan look at both inward values as well as outward market positioning, the last step was to help finalize the experience principles for his service. The group went back to the initial post-it clusters from the first activity. Together, they determined what key themes emerged, and which adjectives best captured Ryan’s service differentiation. Ryan, of course, had the final vote on which principles were best, and they were:
- Incentivized (tax reduction, monetized waste, value…)
- Nurturing (building communities, empowering, connected…)
- Intelligent (platform, quantified, smart…)
- Compassionate (giving back, helping marginalized individuals, impactful…)
The group was now armed with a clear direction, guiding further exploration of user needs and service features in the next set of activities.
Part 2: Persona Understanding (Empathize with Key Personas)
For the second part of the workshop, Nick shifted the group’s focus to Ryan’s target customers. Given the time constraints of this two hour workshop, Nick presented a short 10 min overview of three personas that the EPAM design team crafted based on previous discussions with Ryan.
Nick described three individuals who were all very different in terms of: where they live, type of building they live in, experience with composting, focus on environmental issues, and comfort with technology. Nick’s overview helped the group to empathize with the wide spectrum of people who are likely to use Ryan’s service, and also consider what they might need throughout the experience.
Regardless of how much research a client has done about its users (obviously — the more the better!), EPAM always recommends a persona activity to help guide any ideation session about a product or service’s features. It’s important to take an initial stab at this, as the personas can and should always be refined over time, once more customer insights are gathered.
Part 3: Service Journey Mapping and Feature Ideation (Defining the features that make up the service)
The group was now ready to transition into the final workshop activity. Once again, the group divided into teams. This time, each team was tasked with focusing on a different user persona. This made it much easier for everyone to “step into the persona’s shoes,” and truly immerse themselves in the needs of this one individual.
Each team had its own template for product feature ideation. Again, due to the short nature of the workshop, the EPAM design team had pre-crafted “How Might We” questions. They were specific to each persona, and were posted along key phases of the journey, which included:
- Excite (get user interested in the service)
- Onboard (get user set up and ready to use)
- Use (support user in composting)
- Reward (enable incentives, carbon credits, etc.)
- Recommend (help user to share the service with others)
The teams were tasked with ideating product features, using the “How Might We” questions for inspiration. The questions focused on key user needs, and in some cases provoked interesting areas to explore. For example, one HMW question was:
“How might Victoria’s compost bin become a talking piece in her apartment, so that when she has friends over, they too can get interested in the service?”
This one question generated a lot of interesting ideas, including having Victoria’s friends interact with the compost bin through Amazon’s Alexa, chatting about how much food has been collected over time and the impact that Victoria has made. Teams came up with dozens of great ideas like this throughout each user phase.
A critical piece to the activity, was ensuring that teams were tying back their ideas to the experience principles of the service. After ideating, it forced each participate to question:
“Is this idea truly incentivized, nurturing, intelligent, or compassionate? If not, what would help it better align with the differentiated brand?”
Participants expressed just how helpful this line of questioning was throughout the ideation process.
Closing
To close out the workshop, the team shared all of their fantastic ideas, which Ryan enthusiastically captured. Everyone felt very lucky to be given the chance to support Ryan’s worthy cause.
In the space of two hours, we were able to go broad and understand AEG as a company, look at the market, consider AEG’s user base, define a differentiated set of experience principles, and explore key features. All of which Ryan is going to take away and mold into a service.
