How to improve our offering to customers – make it more attractive and stand out
- duboislukas
- Dec 27, 2021
- 6 min read
“A great product or service sells itself”. You will have heard this before – and there is a lot of truth to it. If you want to “do more Marketing” to push your business, I strongly recommend that you start by taking a hard look at your offering. Actually, this is the core of Marketing: designing an attractive product or service that stands out in some way and offers customers something they really need or want and cannot find elsewhere. If you get this right, the rest of Marketing becomes so much easier and, indeed, often falls into place almost by itself.
In this article, I will give you a structured and guided approach for how to use the Customer Journey to come up with a whole list of ideas to improve your offering to customers. As always with Journey Marketing, the focus lies on your customers and how to delight and excite them best with your offering (read "An Introduction to Journey Marketing").
Believe me, no matter where you stand today, there is always a lot of untapped opportunity to become more special, surprising and memorable for your customers. Exceeding their expectations is the key for them to come back to you next time, to talk about you to their friends and recommend you. Such a virtuous dynamic is the best Marketing that can happen to you. Your time and money is best invested here.
Believe me, no matter where you stand today, there is always a lot of untapped opportunity to become more special, surprising and memorable for your customers.
Improving your product or service experience
In most cases, your product or service will be the single most important experience your customers have with you. So, let’s focus in this article on these “touchpoints” and on the Usage Phase of your customers. This might be the actual toy products of a fictive toy company “Nature Toys” or the coffee and the flowers sold at a fictive “Coffee&Things” store. For a doctor’s office like a fictive dentist “Doctor D.”, it would be the actual visit and treatment by the doctor.
You should first sit down (with your team) and think about how the Usage Phase of your customer could be split up in sub-phases.
For example, in the case of “Doctor D.”, sub-usage-phases of patients could be arrival, waiting, treatment, checkout/farewell. For customers of the physical products of “Nature Toys”, Usage Phases could be unboxing, first play, routine play, combined play, at-home play, on-the-go play, repair, addition/extension purchases, etc.
Be creative here and come up with relevant and distinct usage phases or situations. You can probably already feel that they are the basis for creating new or improved usage experiences.
Now comes the real fun part. For each of your Usage-Sub-Phases, brainstorm how you could improve your customers’ experience. Or even better come up with special, unique and surprising experiences that exceed your customers’ normal expectations. Trust me, you can come up with dozens of ideas.
Our dentist “Doctor D.” can of course offer more specialized treatments or technologies. But they can also think about how to make even standard treatments more memorizable and unique. Especially, addressing the typical customer issues of uncomfortableness and not even being able to speak during treatment. Maybe by using specially scented gloves or playing music, the news or a choice of interesting documentaries. Going to the dentist could become a learning experience. Even besides the actual treatment, he could consider things like a little welcome gift upon arrival. For the waiting room phase they could think of more unusual forms of entertainment or information like iPads or great coffee-table books or art exhibitions. They could use buzzers like in restaurants nowadays. Anything that makes the waiting and treatment phases delightful and memorable, instead of dreadful.
For physical products like “Nature Toys” the focus would be more on the design and function of the toys themselves. Ideas for improvements or variations can come from the different usage situations of the kids-customers. Maybe they need a cool transport box for on-the-go or special equipment that allows some sort of play-combination with other toys.
The examples above make clear how important it is to put yourself in the customers’ shoes. It requires you to really re-construct your customers’ Usage Journey in detail - to understand the specific situations and involved touchpoints as well as customers’ emotions, needs and pains. Close observation or interviews can help you get this kind of deeper understanding.
A very important input for your brainstorm should be your defined target group (see also Introduction to Journey Marketing). What is special about this group that could ask for a different and unique experience that they don’t find elsewhere?
Does “Doctor D.” target children specifically? Could “Nature Toys” design specific toys for boys, girls or kids with certain handicaps or any other specific interest-fields? That would open up whole different realms of ideas.
It may also help to invite friends or other “outsiders” to such a brainstorm for fresh perspectives and inspiration. Another proven technique is to take inspiration and borrow ideas from other industries or companies. A fun exercise is to imagine the most innovative companies you can think of and ask yourself: “what would Google (or Apple or Tesla, etc.) do if they had a coffee shop or a dentist office?”
Workshop Box
Here is a step-by-step guidance for setting up a workshop to do the above.
You need to figure out a format that works for you. Either a physical wall with post-its or a digital board to fill out the following steps from top to bottom. This will become your Customer Journey Map and I recommend you create a place where it can stay and live on. It is a great reference for you and your team, and the improvement of your Customer Journey really never ends.
Customer Journey Map
Journey (sub-) Phases: they come on the very top and you add all the sub-phases of the Usage Phase that you can think of below.
Customer Needs: for each sub-phase collect your (target) customers’ needs and pains. You need that to understand what the sub-phases are really about for your customers. In the end, you need to decide on the most important topics with the highest potential for improvements and customer delight.
Touchpoints: which are the critical points of interaction in each phase? This will often just be the product, but can also be the waiting room, the counter, the outside of your Coffee shop or any other context of your customers usage experience. Sometimes the core of an innovative idea is a touchpoint that others don’t pay attention to.
Activities: finally, at the bottom, come all your ideas for improved or unique and surprising customer experiences. They flow out of the above phases, needs and touchpoints.
Prioritization
In the end you will have a large number of ideas about improving your product or service. It’s a great backlog of things to realize over time. But first things first. You have to prioritize and focus. Do the most impactful things first. Make the most of your surely limited time & budget capacities. Here is how you select those top ideas: You rate them along 3 criteria.
Customer relevance: how important is that experience to your customers? Game changer or nice-to-have?
Feasibility: how easy is this for you to realize? How much money, time and resources will this cost? How much external help will you need for it?
Differentiation: how special, unique and different is it compared to what customers would get elsewhere? How big would the surprise (and the WOW) be for your customers?
You want to tackle the activity ideas in your top-right Prio 1 corner first. These are the ones that will have a great impact on your customers' experience and are relatively easy to implement. Ideas in both Prio 2 buckets can go on your backlog for next things to tackle, when time & money allow it again. Pay attention to the size of the bubble. Indicate with bigger bubbles the ideas that you think will create "Wow-Effects" with your customers, because they are so unexpected and unusual. Try to realize some of these first!
Such a workshop does wonder. Not only will it sharpen and improve your product and service, it’s also great to create a joint team understanding and awareness for what your offering is really all about, how you want to excite your customers, who you really want to be.
I would be excited to hear how this exercise has worked for you and how you have set it up for your business and situation specifically.
Lastly, in this article we only focused on the Usage Phase of your customers and on your product or service. Surely the right start, but definitely not the end. There is also great potential for delightful and unique customer experiences in the previous journey phases of Search and Purchase. In fact, sometimes these can make the real difference. So, in my next article, I will continue this Journey Innovation exercise, looking at the rest of your Customer Journey and all the other touchpoints waiting to be transformed into WOW-experiences for your customers.
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