Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition: Managing Customer Experience for Profit

Identifying the customer chain is important because value propositions depend on your being able to analyse, quantify and articulate the experience that a customer will receive when choosing your offering.

Value propositions really have weight where they are related to specific market segments, specific offerings used over specific time frames, specific sales opportunities, and to targeted constituencies within those specific sales opportunities.

Here are a few research techniques for you to think about: face-to-face interviews; telephone interviews; focus groups; online surveys; written surveys.

benefits map. This is the foundation for your value-based message development: the elements that are important, interesting and valued from a customer experience perspective. This is the start point for your message development.

You need to ascertain needs: What precisely are your customers’ needs? What do your customers value? Of these, which areas have priority over others, and why? Which competitors or alternatives measure up to these areas of value? How does your organization stack up? What are the benefits and costs experienced by your customers in the process?

becoming the customer is about uncovering what would be most valuable to customers and that your organization can deliver profitably.

Because a value proposition defines how an offering will benefit a market segment or customer, and at what cost, it is logical to start by defining the market segment or customer types: who are to be the targeted recipients of the benefits in return for their investment in monetary and other terms?

You also need to ascertain what experience they wanted and have experienced. Were they looking for a more transactional experience? (That is, cheap, quick, low-touch, no relationship.) Or were they looking for a consultative experience? (That is, high interaction, strong relationships, advice, commensurate value-pricing.) Were they looking for a va

All messages are not created equal. They come in three flavours: rational, political and emotional (Figure 12.2