Customer Value and Customer Process: Two building blocks for building customer experiences

In order to design and deliver great customer experiences it is necessary to understand customers in-depth. Traditional approaches to segmenting and capturing user requirements are not suitable because they all face on big challenge: in order to really surprise the customer one has to go beyond the obvious and explicit needs and focus on the latent needs of the customer.

In order to capture these latent needs, it is necessary to employ so called empathic research methods that help the designer or engineer of a new product or service understand the underlying motivation and goals of the customer. Usually market research budgets are not located for this.

One potential method to identifying latent customer needs is to deeply understand customer value and the customer process. With a suitable modeling language one is able to illustrate unmet needs and potential areas for improvement. If you want to read more about the empathic research have a look at the article “abstract truth“, written Alan South, Director of Service Design of IDEO, UK.

What is Customer Value?
Customer Value is the customer’s perception of what they want to have happen (i.e. the consequences) in a specific use situation, with the help of a product of service offering, in order to accomplish a desired purpose or goal.

What is a Customer Process?
A customer process is the sequence of activities that a customer has to perform to satisfy a need or to solve a specific problem, e.g., building a house. A customer process therefore determines the required products and services that a service provider has to offer to cover a customer process entirely.

With these two concepts in mind it is now possible to dive further into actual methods and tools to capture and describe customer value and customer processes.