Challenges of looking at customer value creation - How to apply and measure in a practical way.

The order of the day in the market is differentiation. After a huge investment cycle until 2021, which reversed to a moment of capital scarcity, in addition to an extremely competitive environment leveraged by the boom of startups that emerged in recent years and that operate globally, made companies get out of their comfort zone and think about how to differentiate themselves beyond their product or service.

This increased a movement that has been existing for some time, which is to focus on the value proposition for your customer to solve their pain points and leverage their gains. A framework that is already well known is the Value Proposition Canvas, which maps these pain points and gains and how we can address them as a product, solution or service.

In one of my last experiences as Director of Consulting and Customer Experience at a company that delivers a software-as-a-service solution, I was responsible for a team that was the first contact to a new customer in the company. And in our day-to-day life with consultants and customers, we always wondered how to measure if we were generating the expected value for the customer, both to know if our product was in line with the market, but mainly to ensure that we were doing our work as a Trusted Advisor of our customers and also to always improve our way of acting.

For a long time I tried to find a way to measure this ROI of our customers or at least the generation of value, but it is not a simple task. This is because we usually get an idea of their goals, but not in a tangible way, or they cannot share their numbers with us. The closest we got is measuring the CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) of the project, but I understand that this is more of a transactional measurement of the implemented service, not giving clarity about the value generated, which is the final goal.

TSIA , one of the leading associations of technology and software companies in the world, suggested in a recent article entitled “The future of technology professional services” a new way for professional services areas to be measured. Moving away from the current focus on performance, project delivery, service margin, to a path that is also more directed to value proposition and ROI. A point of attention is that the article mentions that the maturation of this concept will only take place in 2030.

Not wanting to wait all this time, I decided to look for some method or market framework that could more clearly measure the expected outcomes for our customers with the service and product and where I found Fit For Purpose.

Fit For Purpose is a framework conceived through a book, which also became a course, by David J. Anderson, renowned by the Kanban University. He wrote in partnership with Alexei Zheglov, after an experiment with a similar goal to mine. Measure the result generated to their students participating in many of their courses aimed at Kanban. He wanted to know based on what purpose or motivator the student contracted his courses. And based on this, also measure the satisfaction linked to these criteria.

The framework addresses three main components for value delivery. Design, Implementation and Service Delivery. All of which must be conceived from a customer purpose. Also addressing a way to measure this result, which is what caught my attention the most, which is the F4P Card. A simple card divided into 3 parts, which allows you to map the individual purpose of each customer, and in a qualitative way that the customer himself responds at the end of the delivery of the product or service how much that initial purpose was or was not met.

We started using this method in our customer onboarding journey, mapping in the commercial process the motivators for the acquisition of the product, and validating after the completion of the service implementation how much it really reached its business objectives. Not bringing it exhaustively, but in the case, many customers bought the product thinking about increasing e-commerce cart conversion. After the project delivery, the customer may not open the real increase in conversion, however through the F4P Card, he could answer on a scale of 0 to 5 how much he felt that purpose being met.

This set of responses generated a score counted in a similar way to NPS. In the first quarter of use it was possible to clusterize in just under 20 items from more than 300 reasons responded. In addition, after the implementation, a rate close to 30% of qualitative responses about the expected result of the customers was reached, which allowed to act to improve the onboarding journey, train the team in the business specificities, improve product features and support Customer Success Managers through playbooks to lead the next steps in customer success.

A key point about CX, mentioned in the book The Digital Transformation Playbook by Professor David Rogers , is that today's customer is looking for a personalized experience. This does not necessarily mean a customizable product. But that the customer feels genuinely heard and that they are not buying something off the shelf. F4P has helped to gain more clarity on this, by taking the customer onboarding process from being a service focused on getting a software up and running, to being a journey of value creation based on the purpose of each new customer, including reaching the first value in a more aligned and faster way, ensuring a healthy partnership from the first contact.

Do you want to know more about the challenge of capturing the customer value generated through F4P? Send me an inbox here on LinkedIn.