What to tell your service Customers!

Now you've got a 'rich picture' and a succinct value proposition.  Can you look the Customer in the eye and tell them the following things?

How you've added value in all the solution areas, to maximise your proposition?

What defined/known problems have you solved for the Customer?  (What's your evidence? Ideally shouldn't be more of the same.)

That you've quantified the improvement they see?

How are you tying in your reward to their service improvement?

How you are helping them transform and making the transition trouble-free? (There's an inevitable change of Customer internal processes and procedures - hopefully there'll be less of them.)  

Service? What Service?

"What was it you needed again?"

Full of beans, you and the organisation are ready to create a rich picture of the service you want to offer.

A trap companies can fall into is to immediately design the service you want to give the customer, based on what you're best at or known for.  So you're already delving in to the how, whether it's delivering technology, insurance or a retail experience.  It's a fairly natural move - it's comfortable, it's familiar.  But it might also stop you thinking what can be done better or differently for a customer or market segment.

An approach I recently used, that flowed very naturally, was using the step sequence below. (Admittedly some of us had dived down to some extent in familiar areas before seeing the holistic picture.  But a little of what you fancy does you good, in our case leading to a richer and better informed discussion.)

The sequence went:

• Create a high level vision for the service.
• E.g. what are you going to deliver, where, when, how quickly, with what level of confidence, and at what relative price?
• What are the high level requirements for the service?
• Examples might be rapid deployment, low management burden but high transparency and control, improved decision-making support, ...
• What are the top level capabilities and skills required?
• E.g. strong project planning & execution skills, excellent supply chain management, efficient global logistics, ...
• What are the required behaviours and culture?
• Are you going to be transactional or collaborative, how much transparency will you give, will you create embedded teams, are there shared outcomes/targets?
• What is the transition and phasing?
• How much due diligence is needed, are there pilot schemes, what are the interim capability levels, how will you phase the roll-out?
• What is the service 'architecture'?
• So finally (!), what activities will you do, what are the logical/physical/information flows, what innovation can you bring?
• What do you want to get paid for and how?
• Are your prices fixed, volume/activity-based, are you going to offer efficiency targets, what is your profit expectation?
• Can you do it?
• Do you have the core skills, how will you address gaps, are you going to team with other organisations? 
• On what grounds are you competing?
• On what grounds aren't you competing, what is your unique blend of skills and capabilities?

Once that all that is sorted, you can begin to use rich pictures, storyboards or executive summaries of the service you are going to offer.  

Service? That Service!

Wealthy Pictures

A painful experience earlier this year was around telling your story in pictures.  Yet, another such experience later in the year was very successful.

The difference?  In the first case our team tried to use a systems engineering diagram (MODAF view for those interested) to explain 'how it works' and 'what's in it for you' to our sponsors.  In the second case we used a 'rich picture' that showed benefits and the nature of transformations. (Nicely defined in Wikipedia, and a lovely health care example here.)

It shouldn't have been a surprise that the former approach was not a stellar success!  A typical Enterprise Architecture chart, for example, shows what happens beneath the bonnet.  Your stakeholders are more interested, however, in (stretching the motoring analogy, sorry Clarkson) why they should buy that car and those extras. (A.k.a. the benefits and the look and feel.)

Along with the rich picture approach, you also have to be able to express your value proposition equally powerfully and simply in words!  (That bit never changes.)