The sources for remarkable customer experiences are not only great products as we are often made to believe but also great services that engage customers and create additional value.

Customer experiences are enabled by thoughtfully designing the complete lifecycle of your customers and understanding their needs from the “prenatal stage” when they are not even aware of your offerings until they drift away and don’t repurchase anymore (which should obviously prevented before).

Different models exists that aid in understanding this process with various names. Most commonly these models are called the marketing cycle, sales cycle or consumer buying cycle. The following picture shows an example of such a consumer buying cycle.

Understanding the needs of customers in the single stages is just as important as understanding the needs for the product or service that a company is offering for the “Application” stage of the cycle.

One high-potential area for service innovation is the “after-sales” stage in the buying cycle, when a formal relationship with customers is already established. But then again, it depends on your customers needs to identify the area where to find the biggest potential for innovative services.

This is not just relevant for business-to-consumer markets but also for business-to-business markets where innovative services can lead to significant increases in performance or overall cost-reductions.

Some examples how manufacturing companies use after-sales services to generate revenue can be found in the report “The Service Revolution” from Deloitte, the overview table is shown below.

Why do I blog this? While everyone likes to talk about service innovation in consumer markets maybe the real potential for service innovation is in the business markets? Maybe service design has much more potential in the B2B area than in the field for creating the “next Starbucks experience”?

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Not a lot is written about Jonathan Ive, the creative genius behind most of Apple’s products. The Independent has a short article about him and Jonathan explains his understanding of design.

"The word design is everything and nothing. We think of design as not just the product’s appearance, it’s what the product is, how it works. The design and the product itself are inseparable."

On the relationship between design and experience

"And when I say the product I mean the product in its total sense, the hardware and the software, the complete experience that people will have. We push each other, we’re very self-critical and we’ll take the time to get the product right."

Read the full article here.

Here is another article from 2006 about him: BusinessWeek: Who is Jonathan Ive?

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I will be attending the "U² Understanding Users" conference and intensive training on User-Centered Design in Brussels on May 22.

We all want our customers to be satisfied with our products. The process of creating a successful user experience requires empathy with the user, insight into the needs, wants and limitations of the end user and a willingness to be open to new solutions.

First Conference and intensive training on User-Centered Design in Brussels

U^{2  _}  Understanding Users will emphasize the importance of User-Centered Design and other cutting-edge methods and their applications for industry, as well as discuss practical tools for working user-centered design principles into product development and keeping them there.

 

Do you attend the conference as well? Drop me an email, I am arriving in Brussels already on the May 21st. If you can not attend, check back in a few days to read my wrap-up of the conference.

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One common practice when testing the marketing potential of a product is to ask customers if they are satisfied with a product or service. Focus groups are the favorite method to invite customers to provide feedback. One should think customers will buy your products or services because they are satisfied with them, right? Well, not really.

I have already written about the challenge of asking customers if they are satisfied with your products or services. But asking customers whether they are satisfied or not is not really helpful either. Everyone using a five blade shaver is probably satisfied with the results compared to a four blade shaver but how many would really buy a five blade shaver?

What questions do we need to ask in order to get an answer that predicts the probability that customers will buy? In order to predict whether anyone will buy your products, you have to find out if your products or services provide any value to the customer. If they do provide value, is this value unique and you are not facing other competitors?

Buying is an exchange of value and a customer is only willing to buy your product if you are providing value. So even though customers might be satisfied with your products or services, they still might not be interested in buying it because they do not provide value.

Why do I blog this? A quick reminder that customer satisfaction is a valuable tool to answer the right set of questions. But one has to understand more aspects than just customer satisfaction to fully describe the success of a new product or service. Of course we can extend the meaning of the word “satisfaction” but at the end you will always end up referring to (perceived) customer value.

Photo courtesy of lyricsboy

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“There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong”
H.L.Mencken

Found in the May 2008 Issue of Harvard Business Review. I think you can easily translate it into something else as well:

“There is always an easy answer to every question about your customers – neat, plausible and wrong”.

If you have ever attended a meeting with managers talking about customers and making “uninformed decisions” without evidence, you know what I am talking about.

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