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How to define customer value when building products
Customer value is about understanding further how your audience recognises value in what you are doing: that is, their perceived value of your product, and how you help the customer realise that value.
Spoiler alert! It is not through your features and solutions. Value comes from the behaviours and habits you’re helping your customer form through the use of your product. And yes, to go a bit cliche here — it is in fact about the outcome you help them achieve, not the output you’ve built.
Let’s take a look!
The Customer Value Explorer
Before we talk about value, let’s take a step back and set the scene.
When you are looking to kick off this exercise, it’s important to consider what your current business objectives are. Customer value points will link to those objectives, making sure your work is focused and has a real impact.
Now, when taking a look at customer value, RightToLeft has developed a worksheet called the Customer Value Explorer (CVE). You can use this to start mapping out customer value against those business objectives.
The CVE looks at:
- How would the customer recognize this value?
- What are the customer KPIs? (how does the customer measure this)
- What customer actions or behaviours impact the value?
- How could the product help improve these behaviours?
To further explore these, we can ask ourselves the following question: are we best positioned to create this value for the customer?
By taking the time to carefully answer these questions, you can uncover whether or not your value assumptions are correct. In addition, you can further clarify whether some of the problems you are looking to explore are even within the realm of things your product can or should solve.
