3-steps to get time back (and grow your business) — part 1 of 2:
Understanding customers and what you’re actually selling…
‘I don’t have enough time,’ said most of the one hundred and sixty businesses Fluxx for Good has mentored as part of the British Library’s Innovating for Growth programme.
The most common themes we’ve noticed during our conversations are, people:
- Don’t know enough about their customers (and often think they have only one type).
- Aren’t aware of what they are actually offering — the importance of ‘value exchange’.
- Haven’t considered the detail of the emotional journey their customers take.
Fluxx for Good helps companies with a social purpose to grow and move forward. We help them change direction, pivot, think differently, transform, grow, whichever verb you’d like to use. In short, we help organisations gather evidence, in turn, gain the confidence to make (important) decisions.
The tools, exercises and processes which aid decision making have a crucial kicker — they will give you time back in your day too.
Each tool used individually will help develop your business. The real power comes from combining them. Doing so will maximise time to spend thinking about the direction of your business rather than getting bogged down doing your business.
Granted, there is an irony in suggesting more things to do to give you time back but the Return On Investment will be manifold.
The conclusion of the exercises will be:
- You’ll waste less time attracting the wrong customers.
- A list of how to make improvements to your service (so the customers you do attract will be happier).
- Plus a simple structure for your time/brain…and sanity.
1. Understanding your customer
The first question we often ask at the British Library is ‘Have you spoken to a customer to get feedback recently?’
<insert blank face> (not every time but — certainly more often than is advisable)
Customers hold a lot of information which is simple to gather, and when turned into insight is an essential aid in serving them better. If you don’t do this, your competition will — if they are not already. So, it’s important to define who your customers are — and who they are not.
Fluxx for Good is working with 4bySix, a streetwear brand that utilises creative projects, functional products and collaborative spaces to help the homeless. Using surveys, video interviews and a workshop, we defined and segmented their customers into four ‘types’, which helped them target their brand towards the people that it best serves, for different reasons.
Exercises & Tools:
- Interview customers. It needn’t be overwhelming, aim for ten in the first instance. Keep the questions open-ended, don’t ‘lead the witness’ — let them do most of the talking and if you can, video them (people often say one thing while their expression says quite another).
- Survey as many customers as you can — begin with your friends’ friends and their friends (via email & social media). Keep the questionnaire short and remember, no leading questions. We want honest answers.
- Customer (user) research tips from Fluxx.
Output: The industry term is Personas: Characters created from real insight. See an example below, online examples here and more detail of how to create one here.
Note: It’s likely you’ll have more than one customer persona e.g. people that buy from you (e.g. neutral navigator, frequent buyers, one-off buyers…), people that supply you, and so on. It important to also remember that your team are ‘customers’ of your business too — internal ones — if they aren’t happy, your customers are unlikely to be.
2. Value exchange (what you are actually selling?)
If you think you sell a product alone, you’re mistaken. You implicitly sell a range of value exchanges throughout the experience of your product, and in turn, service.
At the centre of the Business Model canvas is Value Propositions — and there’s a reason it’s positioned there. It shows the exchange between what a customer wants/needs, and the service you offer (why a customer would hand over their hard-earned cash). It’s so important, it has its very own canvas. See below.
Exercises & Tools:
- Value proposition canvas — Start with the Customer profile circle — think about what happens in your customers’ lives, what are they trying to achieve (not just in relation to your product — think wider)? Then do the other Product (value map) square — in general, what could happen to make your customers lives easier? How then, can your business help with that?
- For more on this, see How to use the Value proposition canvas in more detail
Output: A deeper understanding of your customers and more detail of what you’re offering to make their lives better (and make you money).
3. The (emotional) Customer Journey
You have defined your customer(s), and you know more about what you are actually selling.
The next step is to map out the journey each persona takes through your service.
‘You don’t sell a bed, you sell a good night’s sleep.’ It’s an old cliche, and it’s fundamentally true. While the product is of key importance, it’s the comfort and security the customer feels that ultimately makes the sale.
Sales only happen when there’s an emotional step change, for example:
I desire something > I gain confidence in your product > I’m convinced to purchase > I love using your product/service > I’m happy to purchase again (I tell all my friends how great it feels to use it).
A customer journey map is a timeline of value-exchange opportunities.
The reason to map your customers’ journeys is to break down your service into bite-sized stages. Then you can look at how to enable improvements at each stage (your to-do list), and change each customer’s emotional response towards being happier. As you increase the chances of your customer wanting to progress from stage to stage, you ultimately improve their overall experience.
Fluxx for Good has helped AVUK (a charity giving deaf children the opportunity to listen and speak as equals alongside their hearing peers) and InHouse records (the world’s first fully functional record label to be launched in prison, created with and by prisoners, with the goal of reducing reoffending).
AVUK and InHouse are amazing, and respectively very different, causes. After a diagnostic session, it was clear that both organisations needed to map their customers’ journeys. AVUK wanted to learn how it could better serve its customers and find more efficient ways of working. InHouse, like many startups, had been so busy doing the business but wanted to map out its process firstly to make sense of it, and secondly to be able to put timings to it.
Here are the steps they took:
Exercises & Tools:
- With your team, map out the stages of your entire experience: think about a person who has never heard about your business (someone who’s ‘cold’) from initial contact (discovery), to point of purchase, after purchase care, through the service you provide, customer care, and beyond. What does your customer want/need/desire at each stage? Is it a positive or negative experience? How can your service enable an exceptional, frictionless service (make them ‘hot prospects’)?
Output: An even deeper understanding of your customers and a todo list (enablers backlog) of service improvements.
Next step..?
Ask the next person you see about your product/service for some feedback and build from there. The above might sound like a lot but if you break it down it’s not. Keep the customer at the heart of your business and taking those steps will give you time back to spend on the growth of your company. If you discover you need to grow in a different direction exercises 1. and 2. can be used to sense check desirability (combined with experimenting, using a Minimum Viable Product method) before investing in making any, perhaps vital, changes.
PART 2 of 3-steps to get time back (and grow your business) is about adding structure to your day to help you carve out even more time.
If you’d like to see ways we’ve helped companies and could help yours, take a look at our site: Fluxx.uk.com, subscribe to our newsletter and/or read the free download of our new book The Plan Sucks.
Adam Slawson is a lead consultant at Fluxx, a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to transform their businesses. We work with organisations such as Atkins, National Grid, the Parliamentary Digital Service and the Royal Society of Arts. Email me if you’d like to know more.
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy “7 things kickboxing taught me about innovation”, “Social media: A silent killer of innovation”, “The one where Friends teaches you how to be a great service designer”, “Six behavioural flaws that make us stupid around money” and “13 things we learned while designing a more democratic Houses of Parliament.”
For more visit our Medium page: https://medium.com/fluxx-studio-notes
