As you may have guessed, providing great benefit to
customers doesn’t occur by accident. It comes directly from
applying a well-designed value philosophy. What does it
take to create outstanding products and services that are
not only profitable, but also capable of converting
ordinary consumers into “raving fans”?
This article covers four critical ingredients that produce
stellar products, services, and customer relationships. You
can boost your product and service value to a level that
truly “wows” customers by doing the following things:
1. Researching your audience’s needs.
Creating impeccable results begins with the approach you
take toward researching what your customers or prospects
want and need. Developing successful offerings then
involves incorporating what you learn into solutions they
want to buy. Where and how you derive your product and
service design requirements can hugely influence the
success of your offerings, and extends beyond product
design into the entire customer experience.
Ways to research what matters to your audience’s success
include the use of interviews and needs assessments, mining
the information in your customer database, and probing
customer headaches via support calls and surveys.
2. Making your offerings safe, reliable, and easy to use.
Many elements contribute to making a product or service
friendly and intuitive. Two factors that strongly influence
the success of your offerings are 1) how simple the
features and interface are, and 2) how much support your
offerings give customers for achieving real-life goals.
Many companies mistakenly believe that perpetually adding
fancy features will increase customer satisfaction. In
reality, complexity can backfire and actually keep
customers from achieving success.
If you already have a product or service, before you
release the next version, perform a difficulty analysis by
asking:
– Does the system guide people in achieving their
real-world goals?
– Have you prevented all unnecessary options and features
from creeping in?
– Have you automated or kept to a bare minimum all tedious
setup?
– Have you performed a “hassle hunt” to remove known
customer annoyances?
Depending on the answers, you might need to add more
guidance, simplify the design, or hide complexity more
elegantly.
3. Testing and evaluating your offerings.
Do you have a way to tell whether your offerings achieve
exactly what both you and your customers expect? Are your
products and services confusion-free, even if they carry
out complicated tasks? How well do they perform their
intended actions? By using powerful testing and evaluation
techniques, you can reveal the answers in a systematic way.
To begin with, you would want to use a specification to
describe what your product or service is intended to do,
and have a way to continually compare your product or
service against that specification to determine whether it
actually 1) does what it’s supposed to do, 2) does it
correctly, and 3) as advertised.
Then, a combination of requirements evaluation, usability
testing, alpha testing, and beta testing can become your
“secret sauce.” The earlier in the life cycle this process
can begin – specifically, in the requirements and design
stages, when the initial concepts are still on the drawing
board – the more successful your offerings will be at
satisfying customer needs and desires. An early starting
point will let you build quality incrementally into your
offerings, instead of trying to add it as an afterthought,
the way your competitors might.
4. Focusing on consistency to cement your brand promise.
When consumers are pleased with what you offer, how do they
show it? Usually, by becoming loyal, repeat customers. But
what if they’re unhappy? The majority will quietly take
their money elsewhere, and you’ll probably never hear the
reason.
What’s the solution? Creating consistently compelling
customer experiences that galvanize consumers, who then
can’t stop telling their family and friends. The recipe for
cooking up highly profitable customer interactions
includes, but is not limited to, recognizing the importance
of focusing on customer retention; over-delivering on
promises, both explicit and implied; striving to prevent
variation in product and service quality; and doing
everything possible to ensure your customers’ downstream
success.
In conclusion, using this four-part formula for increasing
product and service value can transform your offerings from
being lackluster, difficult, or even hazardous to use to
“wowing” your audiences with superb experiences. By 1)
researching audience needs; 2) making your offerings safe,
reliable, and easy to use; 3) testing and evaluating your
offerings; and 4) focusing on consistency to cement your
brand promise, you will create countless ways to attract
buyers who become raving fans!
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Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is the author of the award-winning
“Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance” program.
She helps people “discover and recover” the profits their
businesses may be losing every day through overlooked
performance potential. To sign up for more free tips, visit
her site at http://LearnShareProsper.com
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