A customer value strategy will articulate your company’s approach to creating and delivering customer value. This strategy should consider the needs and wants of your target customer base and your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Once you have a clear customer value strategy, you can start aligning your business around it. This means ensuring that all aspects of your company work together to create and deliver customer value. This can be a challenge, but creating a sustainable competitive advantage is essential.
Customer value is the perceived benefits (tangible and intangible) and perceived costs (tangible and intangible) of a product or service from the customer’s perspective. To align your company around customer value, you must first understand how customers segment themselves and what they consider valuable.
Achieving customer value alignment is essential for any company that wants to be customer-centric. After all, if there is no alignment, there can be no real delivery of customer value. A company might think it is customer-centric, but if it is not delivering on that promised customer value, it is only fooling itself. This lack of alignment manifests in many ways, but some of the most common are:
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- Focusing on the wrong things: If a company is not clear on what customers segment themselves by and what they consider valuable, it will likely end up focusing on the bad stuff. It will invest in features or product development efforts that do not matter to customers and, as a result, fail to deliver real customer value.
- Not integrating silos: Most companies are set up in silos, with different departments responsible for other parts of the business. For a company to be truly customer-centric, those silos need to be integrated so that everyone understands who the customers are and what they want. Otherwise, each department will end up working in its little world with its objectives and priorities, again leading to a lack of alignment and an inability to deliver real customer value.
- Failing to communicate: Even if a company does have a shared understanding of who the customers are and what they want, that won’t matter if there is no effective communication between departments. If different departments are not talking to each other, there will be no way for them to coordinate their efforts and work together to deliver real customer value.
Delivering real customer value requires more than just creating a few new features or redesigning a product. It requires a fundamental shift in how a company thinks about itself and its customer relationship. Only then can it develop the culture needed to support true customer centricity.
Your company’s ability to deliver customer value is the cornerstone of your success. To ensure that you can consistently deliver customer value, you need to have a robust framework. This framework will outline your company’s plan for delivering customer value and should be designed to meet your organization’s specific needs. There are a few key elements that should be included in your customer value delivery framework:
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- Define customer value for your company: What specific things do you want to achieve for your customers? What needs do they have that you can address? What are their pain points, and how can you help them overcome them? Taking the time to define customer value will help ensure that everyone in your organization is on the same page.
- Outline the process for delivering customer value: What steps need to be taken to deliver customer value? Who is responsible for each step? What tools and resources are required? A clear process will help ensure that customer value is delivered consistently and effectively.
- Set up metrics to track progress: How will you know if you successfully deliver customer value? What metrics should you be monitoring? By setting up metrics at the outset, you will be able to track progress and identify areas for improvement.
- Communicate the plan to all stakeholders: Customer value delivery cannot be successful if everyone is not on board with the plan. Be sure to communicate the details of the framework to all stakeholders, and solicit feedback so everyone can contribute.
By creating a robust customer value delivery framework, you will set your company up for success in delivering lasting value to your customers.
Your customer value framework(playbook) should outline your company’s actions to deliver customer value. It should be a living document that evolves as your company grows and changes. And it should be used as a guide for all of your decision-making. If you’re not sure where to start, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
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- What are our core values?
- What do our customers need and want?
- How can we best meet those needs and wants?
- What does our competition offer?
- How can we differentiate ourselves?
- What are our unique strengths and capabilities?
Asking yourself these questions will help you focus on the right things and make better decisions about how to deliver customer value.