The ultimate goal is customer value (avocado chart)
There are two types of data. Traffic data is great for helping organizations optimize their targeting and understand customers traffic patterns. And customer value data, which is the result of a conscious effort to explore customer hypothesis and assumptions with the goal of understanding what the customer finds valuable — so that we can scale it.
Organizations love traffic data (vanity metrics) as it is easy to collect, fits into spreadsheet cells and makes tangible graphs. But, traffic data only helps you optimize the traffic and investment pattern of the interaction — it helps you figure out where to engage with segments.
Customer value data is the result of a process where the digital interactions have been designed to interact with customers in order to probe their customer value.
Traffic data is valuable in that it increases the efficiency of the customer interactions. But it does not help us understand what the customer finds valuable — what the interaction should be about.
With customer value data one can:
- Discover what did people find valuable and employ this.
- Replicate the success?
- Scale the success to other activities, formats, services or relationships?
- Share any insights or learning with the rest of the organization so that they can grow as well?
Understanding a customers traffic pattern does not help us understand what they find valuable, and so there is less opportunity to replicate, scale or transform successes into other teams and parts of the organization.
Re. the avocado-illustration: In a customer oriented organization the goal should be to go beyond being expert at the traffic — the fruit pulp, and work to understand what makes the seed in the avocado grow.
The fruit pulp will give you an excellent avocado, but if you are able to replicate the seed you might be able to always enjoy excellent avocados.
