Customer value curves: defining your value proposition

Making your product standout in a competitive market place

It is not a frequently mentioned method, but creating a customer value curve can quickly and easily help provide teams with focus, clarity and a vision. Customer value curves are a great way to determine opportunities in the market along with what the priorities should be for your product when building the initial experience. This is based on finding out what the key attributes are that users look for from a service or brand when looking as to who should fulfill their task.

If for example you are building a product to help users find the cheapest flights, a customer value curve might identify users look for speed, ease and convenience. Bench marking this against the market may then show the market are fast and convenient but the process isn’t easy in which case there lies an opportunity.

Now a days the are dozens of options for users to choose from to fulfill their goals. By producing a customer value curve, you can ensure you tap into the user centered opportunities based on which attributes the market fails to deliver on, while also understanding which attributes that are most important to users when choosing who to invest in. Below I go over the steps I go through when creating a customer value curve in order to get the best more actionable insights.

Step 1 Discover

The first step you need to take to product a customer value curve is discovery research. It does not, however, need to be time consuming or have a lot of resource invested into it. As this stage you are trying to understand 2 things: who people currently consider going to to fulfill their task and why.

As an example that I will use throughout this article, imagine you are looking at creating a flight price checker. The first question you would ask is: Which company, brand or individual do you currently use or are considering using in order to find the cheapest flights. Then follow this question up with why; Why are you using or considering using this company brand or individual to find cheap flights?

When conducting the discovery research, you need to make sure you are targeting your user group so make sure you use persona data to make sure your speaking to those who are actually interested in using your product.

Step 2 Synthesis

It wouldn’t be qualitative research without synthesising the research to help form the themes common answers. In some cases you might be able to use a world cloud as words they often use to answer the ‘why’ are single word adjectives.

For the sake of the example above, we could say the discovery research was conducted and the common themes that emerged from it were speed, ease, reliability, trust, convenience and reputation. The brands that users consider are Skyscanner, Google Flights and Momondo

Step 3 Rank and rate

You now have the key attributes and the main competitors to do further research on.

As you will likely have multiple attributes, you will need to prioritise these so that (at least initially) you’re putting your focus on the most important ones — dont treat all attributes equally. Therefore ask users a ranking question or Maxdiff question (depending on just how many attributes were mentioned). During this study, you also ask participants to rate the different competitors you learnt about using a 7 point bert scale.

So as an example you would ask: How trustworthy or untrustworthy do you find Google flights for finding the cheapest flights. You then continue doing this for all the attributes and all the competitors until you get the results and scores for each attribute against all the competitors

Its important to note that you should only speak to people who have head of the particular brand so prior asking them to rate anyone ask which brands have they heard of. This will naturally start to affect your response rate as 80% may have heard of Google and only 15% may have heard of Momondo but thats where you may have to do further research to gain statistical significance. All participants can do the ranking.

Step 4 Analyse

Once you have all the data back, you need to analyse it. This can be quick based on the tools you are using. In my case I have been using UserZoom which provide a score for my bert scale which I then plot on my chart which has a maximum score of 7 on the Y axis (an example of what it should look like is below). It is a similar case for the ranking question/max diff provides a score for me so I know which attributes are the most important out of all of them.

As a team you can then determine what to really focus on. In an ideal world the most important attribute is the one the market competition falls short on, but this is often not the case so it is a case of balancing out all the opportunities with the core user requirements.

Step 5 Define

While you have created the customer value curve and have prioritised the attributes there is still an additional step your team could take which is to properly define the attributes according to the users. While we understand users may consider trust to be the most important thing, what to them creates trust, or if its convenience, what is convenience to them. This can produce some really insightful points which you can then build out into the experience.

If for example users see trust as a strong credential from the brand, or a history of doing it, then these are things are the things you need to design for — credential and history to create trust

THE PERSON BEHIND THE WORDS

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