Outcome driven teams using customer value propositions

The purpose of identifying a customer value proposition is to help the team look through the lens of, focus on and measure their work towards what is valuable to the customer and the company — which could be leveraged at scale.

At the heart of Customer Experience is the principle of ‘equal exchange of value’ between the organization and the customer. Illustration by the author.

In order to focus on and deliver value to our customers we need to know what the value looks like and we need to be able to measure and manage it.

This means we need to be aware of the difference between measuring what customers do (interactions and engagement) and why they are doing it (measuring value using outcomes). Let’s start with the former.

What customers do

I used to have a manager that kept saying: “people keep hitting the trees” .. and I was like: “what are you talking about?”. He was an old skiing instructor and he said that when people go down the mountain and through the woods they need to go between the trees, but they keep staring at the trees and they keep hitting them.

To us the trees are the vehicles: our channels, content and/or our solutions. They are how we get to our customers.

Using a channel is not our goal nor the purpose of what we are doing. And to my manager’s point; as long as we keep talking and focusing on the vehicles getting us to our customers that is what we will be aiming for, nothing else.

Question: If we are what we measure what are our current metrics telling us about who we are?

What does this tell us about who we are, what we are, why we are doing what we are doing? And what is an improvement to this — 1300 clicks? What have we accomplished if we reach this metric? Slide by the author.

What motivates people

What we want to do is understand and deliver customer value at scale. But if we keep staring at and talking about marketing as if it’s about channels or content then that is what we are — we have become the vehicles we use to get to our customers, not the value we want to offer, the purpose that guides us or the outcome of our efforts.

.. we have become the vehicles we use to get to our customers, not the value we want to offer, the purpose that guides us or the outcome of our efforts.

Focus on the outcomes

What customer experience is trying to do is not to create an experience — experiences are the trees.

What we are trying to do is help the organization solve for what is valuable to the customer and what is valuable to the business, and then design the experience to get there. The team’s focus is on the outcomes …

This is an illustration Intercom uses to explain to new employees that even if we are building hollow trucks this is not what the customer wants. The customer hires the hollow trucks to get to the outcome: a succesfull Ollie Kick-flip over a rock. Focusing on the outcome informs, inspires and enables the company to build much better hollow trucks. Image source: Intercom

This drive towards focusing on the customer’s outcomes manifested itself in the Outcome Economy, a term coined back in the early 2010s which wants companies to be driven by their value creation for their customers — not their ability to produce stuff.

Using the example of General Electric .. they are making jet engines, but their focus is increased fuel efficiency for the airlines, they make windmills but their focus is increased energy output, and they build trains, but the focus is to make them digital and smart enough that they reduce their own downtime.

What is the desired outcome for your customers that matches the desired outcome for your company — that can be delivered at scale?

How do you identify this value, make it tangible and measurable? And how do you change your teams to start their discussions with the outcomes, and from there work backwards through behavior, process and technology?

That is what the Customer Value Proposition is here to help you figure out and to help the team build and deliver to — at scale.

Example:

e.g. online banking is the technology offering the processes of mobile banking to the customer enabling the behavior to access and control their own money any time and any place, removing any barrier between people and their own cash giving them uninhibited access and control (outcome). The value is the outcome, not the behavior, process or technology at the very bottom of the stack.