Identify your Industry’s Customer Experience Factors

In the last blog, we explored how a deep understanding of your customer
segments (and their expectations of your product) can drive Value Innovation. We identified the reasons that customer subsets choose your product, prioritized which customer segments were the best fit given your organizational capabilities, and searched for synergies in serving specific customer segments in parallel.

Identify Customer Experience Factors

To truly delight your customers (more than the competition), one must have an even more specific understanding of the reasons why your customer chooses (or does not choose) a service in your industry.  To do this, Accelare has found it best to assemble a group of your organization’s leaders for a quick brainstorming session on the following customer experience categories:

• Factors “taken for granted” by your customer which could be eliminated?
• Factors that could be reduced below industry standard?
• Factors most important to your customer which should be raised above industry standard?
• New factors that should be created in your industry, however have just not been offered yet? (Pay attention to areas your industry has not previously considered in the past.  These may constitute areas of Blue Ocean defined by W. Chan Kim and Reneé Mauborgne in their book as “untapped market space, demand creation and the opportunity for highly profitable growth”.

Keep in mind that every industry has factors important to those in the industry, but not that important to the end user.  The key is to identify those factors so that you can either eliminate or minimize them to focus on what the customer really wants.  This leads to Blue Ocean and Value Innovation.  We will conduct this brainstorming activity as a leader in the physical rehabilitation space below:

• Factors “taken for granted” by the customer - Therapists from the best rehabilitation programs
• Factors reduced below standards - Admin staff available to check in patients upon arrival
• Most important factors - Convenient locations, clean physical plant, ease of booking visits, availability of providers, and quality of care
• New factors - Online booking of visits, self-check-in, and mobile friendly website

With just a short brainstorming session, you can create a list of factors most important (and least important) to the customers in your industry.  These factors create the playing field on which your industry competes (or will compete on in the future).  Paying close attention to this list will help you to create your future customer strategy in the future.  In the upcoming blog, we will show you how to use these factors to map yourself against the competition and identify where the opportunities for Value Creation and “Blue Ocean” in your industry lie.

If you are interested in learning more about Customer Experience as it relates to Blue Ocean strategy you can check out this link for more updated content from the original authors of this ground breaking work. 

There are also links for the Blue Ocean Strategy Network which is an exciting group of organizations and entrepreneurs who have successfully deployed a Blue Ocean Strategy in their space.