While the customer value perception is what they want, your value proposition is what you offer to the customer. IF you want a win-win situation, they both need to match.
In these competitive times the commodity, a service or product, is duplicable. Uniqueness has to be in the offering; the proposition; the complete package that the customer is enticed into accepting.
And the customer of today is one smart cookie (pat yourselves on the back, you’re a customer too!), only ready to accept a value proposition that is aligned to their value perception of what they want/need from the company. (Value Perception that Optimizes Customer Satisfaction)
The value proposition forms the basis of a company’s service strategy.
It is the single most important offering a company makes to the customer.
Both, value perception and value proposition are closely related ingredients for building a successful company. They are the yin and yang of business. Value Perception sets the tone of the customer’s desire, while Value Proposition sets the tone for the company and its employee to serve that customer. If you get the first wrong the second will go out of gear – creating a domino effect.
Not getting the value proposition right, the service strategy goes wrong; and you can never get the rhythm of serving the customer correctly. It snowballs into the employee struggling to provide the right kind of service, but failing miserably. Failure gives rise to a despondent employee. There is no way that such a situation can be conducive to developing a great culture within a company. Culture is all about doing the right thing, doing it extremely well and doing it repeatedly, ingraining it into the fabric of the company and becomes its ‘culture’. (my post: Culture comes Last)
So when I see companies struggle to get their culture right, I ask them, ‘Did you get your customer value proposition right first?’
This question always draws baffled looks till I explain; then the penny drops.
A company’s value proposition is the fulcrum that balances the company’s culture with the customer’s perceptions. Get that wrong and it will destroy the confidence of the customer, impact sales, increase churn (customer and employee) and decimate the balance sheet. Worse still, it can destroy any semblance of company culture that you may have, want, or try to create.
Map Proposition to Perception
In the Service Quality (Servqual) gap analysis, the most critical gap for an organization is the void between customer perception and the experience they receive. The primary cause of this gap is the way a company goes about creating their value proposition for the customer.
Without delving into what companies do wrong, let’s look at the simplest route to getting the value proposition right. It’s by asking the customer. Involve them in the process of mapping their perceptions of your company to the value proposition you intend to develop for them. Weave these perceptions into the packaged proposition. It will get your proposition as close as possible to the customer’s perception of your company.
A company’s Value Proposition should be the manifestation of a
Customer’s Value Perception.
