Customer Journeys of Value -- Measuring the Elements of Value

The Elements of Value, a new HBR article from Bain consultants, provides an excellent structure for measuring value in consumer markets. FairPay provides an adaptive process for managing customer journeys that center on value. These ideas can be applied in combination to drive loyalty loops around value, in order to increase Customer Lifetime Value.

Some interesting quotes from the article:

When customers evaluate a product or service, they weigh its perceived value against the asking price. Marketers have generally focused much of their time and energy on managing the price side of that equation...

What consumers truly value, however, can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. How can leadership teams actively manage value or devise ways to deliver more of it, whether functional (saving time, reducing cost) or emotional (reducing anxiety, providing entertainment)?

...A rigorous model of consumer value allows a company to come up with new combinations of value that its products and services could deliver. The right combinations, our analysis shows, pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth. 

FairPay provides a structure for building relationships around value, by giving consumers limited power to set prices that correspond to the value they receive -- for as long as the seller considers them to be fair about how they do that (but not longer). This is described in my post on customer journeys and the elsewhere on my blog (see links below). The elements of value outlined in this HBR article can be an effective structure for the dialogs on value that FairPay inserts into the customer journey to enable that.

Since there are 30 of these elements, in a hierarchy of four levels (functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact), it would not be practical to force dialog on every element on every cycle -- and only some of them will be relevant to any given business. But the dialog structure can be varied adaptively to introduce relevant elements whenever the customer or the business find them to be relevant. This can enable the dialogs to generate rich value data.

And keep in mind, that these specific elements are just a way to specify and communicate value judgments that are actually very intuitive and nuanced. The beauty of FairPay is that it is driven by the consumer's intuitive sense of value.  The seller can drive the dialog based on analytics such as these, to seek to understand that nuanced and intuitive perception of value through simple questions, while the buyer need only respond, and need not be concerned about the structure that is driving that.

The dynamically adaptive nature of FairPay also enables the level of dialog to be varied over time, to collect this important value data without undue burden on customers. Value dialogs might be relatively frequent and detailed when a relationship starts, but only until a common understanding of value is reached.  Then the dialog level can be cut back, or even dropped completely, as long as both parties are satisfied with putting the adaptation process on autopilot, but then re-engaged in more detail any time either party senses a disconnect on their shared understanding of value (for that particular customer).

The article concludes with a quote from an executive that “I have a lot of people working on product features and service improvements, but I don’t have anyone really thinking about consumer value elements in a holistic manner.” FairPay's embedding of dialogs about value into the customer journey loyalty loop makes thinking about customer value elements in a holistic manner central to routine operations.

For a full introduction to FairPay see the Overview and the sidebar on How FairPay Works (just to the right, if reading this at FairPayZone.com). There is also a guide to More Details (including links to a video).