How to Use Customer Value Maps to Guide Service Strategy

In the last couple of blogs, we introduced a 5 Step Process helping firms to build a unique Customer Value Profile for their enterprise.  In this blog, we will dive into the third step in the process where we align your firm to the unique set of Customer Experience Factors in your industry by constructing a Customer Value Map.  This ensures that your organization focuses on what is important to your customer, avoids head to head competition with competitors driving down price, and allows you to minimize effort on areas not important to your customer. 

Build your industry’s Customer Value Map

First, you will need a current list of your industry’s Customer Experience Factors.  These are the aspects of your service or product most valued by your customers.  Each industry has its own unique experience factors (see “x” axis below for examples of customer experience factors in the ambulatory medical service industry). 

Start plotting how your firm currently emphasizes your industry’s customer experience factors on a scale of low, average, and high (blue line in chart below).   Next, you will chart where your competition places emphasis today (orange line in the chart below).  You will likely find that your firm and your competition place emphasis and resources on different factors.

Using this visual representation, leaders can better decide what experience factors they would like to focus on in the future.  Many times we will see multiple competitors in an industry competing head-to-head on the same experience factors, while completely ignoring others that are equally valued by the customer.  Look for these types of opportunities in your industry to move towards “Blue Ocean” and avoid the perils of head-to-head competition.

In our next blog, we will use Customer Experience Factors to help you plan for the future state of your business.  

There are many tools out there that can help to set up a Value Map for your business.  The Value Map above was created within the Workfit Tool.  You can check out this tool by clicking below.