Startups have a huge advantage over large companies. A small team of people dedicated to one, and only one goal. Everybody moves in the same direction. Everybody lives and dies by that goal – or at least their wallets do. Everybody is tightly connected. Everybody contributes well beyond their job descriptions. No legacy customers to support. You get the picture. Of course, startups have unique challenges as well – resource limitations, brand awareness, and only embryonic partnerships, to name a few. But the entrepreneurial thrill and clarity of purpose are energizing.
Now contrast that with a Fortune 500 company that has just decided to pursue its latest strategic initiative.
It’s no wonder that companies often take major initiatives off-site to incubate, effectively replicating the advantages of a startup with the added advantages of the larger company.
But even this has its limitations. Eventually, the existing sales force and partners must be trained. The supply chain must be integrated. Support/service teams must change. That wouldn’t be so difficult for a simple product change, but big Strategies, with a capital S, can require much more.
These issues beg some critical questions: Who is truly empowered to ensure that planned customer experiences are enabled across the company? Who will deal with the conflicting budgets, priorities, biasses, history, and comp plans, all of which are designed to run the old company rather than the new one? Who will ensure that even well-intentioned execution is not crippled by biasses born of the old model? Your strategy is only as good as its execution.
We have found two solutions that work, although neither is perfect:
Which one is best for you depends on your individual situation and on your appetite for a more permanent cross-silo infrastructure with enough power to make change happen.
We use the term Value Alignment to describe how a company can best match its efforts to the needs of customers at every customer touch point. Our technology-based clients typically resonate with this concept as worthwhile, but when push comes to shove, most tech companies focus first on their primary products and services, with other issues addressed later and as lower priorities. Yet those “other issues” can often generate the most persistent customer loyalty results. Products and services can be replicated and customer perceptions will change rapidly, but a great purchasing or support experience, for instance, generates persistent perceptions that can’t easily be shaken by competitors. The “other issues” are sticky.
When we design customer experiences, we help our clients understand that products and services are only a portion of the plan. Everything a customer experiences with or about your company is an opportunity to differentiate yourself. We take into account a wide range of those opportunities; some are directly enabled by products and services while others are independent of the products/services themselves. The opportunities span every encounter from initial exposure to the company, through the shopping and purchasing process, and throughout the life of the relationship.
Full Value Alignment means that every part of your company is working in support of a set of designed experiences.
Like it or not, customer perceptions of your offerings are the only ones that matter. Your carefully crafted value propositions only become true if customers:
And the best way to ensure the customer perceives this value is to align the entire company around this set of experiences.
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