We have previously talked about the importance of creating an empathy map to get to know our customer and thus, offer an extraordinary customer experience. At Moebius we help companies to focus on the needs of their customers, so this time I bring you a tool that once again puts the focus on the customer: Value Proposition Canvas. Sound familiar?
It is a business model tool designed by the Swiss Alexander Osterwalder. The objective of a Value Proposition Canvas is to evaluate whether our product or service proposition will satisfy customer needs.
In this article you will learn how to create a canvas of the value proposition of your organization’s product or service in 6 simple steps. As we can see in the image above, we have two blocks. On the one hand, the value proposition, and on the other hand, the customer profile.
With 6 steps we are going to fill in each of the sections of the blocks of our Value Proposition Canvas.
Customer Profile in the Value Proposition Canvas
The objective of this block is to know the characteristics of our customer. Discover your routine, the situations that generate stress or your day-to-day behavior. It is very important to observe our client, put ourselves in their shoes and understand their routine. To achieve this objective we have to fill in 3 different sections; customer jobs, pains and gains.
Customer Jobs
These are the activities related to our products or services that customers are trying to perform on a daily basis. To find out what they are, we can ask ourselves the following questions:
- In what contexts do our customers operate?
- What tasks are you trying to complete?
- What are the problems they encounter when performing the tasks?
- How do they feel about performing the tasks?
- How do they want to feel?
It is important to emphasize the customer’s need to want to use that product or service, his motivation to perform the activity, and finally, the problems he has to face when performing it.
Imagine your client is a corporate executive who uses a cab service to go to meetings with clients. The job he has to do is to hail a cab, wait for it, ride in it, pay and claim reimbursement of expenses from his company.
Pains
These are our customer’s pains. It refers to the unpleasant situations they have to experience when performing the activities. Some of these situations are as follows:
- A lot of time/money/effort
- They make mistakes in the use of the product or service
- Inadequate organization or management
- Does not know how to use the product, needs to study how it works or does not want to innovate
- They do not have time to look for more suppliers
Continuing with the same case, our client faces several pains when hiring a cab: uncertainty in the waiting time, delay in making the payment and the preparation of the expense note of his company.
Gains
We have already seen our client’s pain points; however, he also expects to experience pleasant situations when performing the activities, such as, for example:
- Adequate quality level
- Satisfy your end customer
- Have a flatter learning curve
- Manage equipment optimally to make the best use of resources
- Save time and money
We have already taken the first step, getting to know our customer. The next thing to do is to adapt our product or service to our customer’s needs.
The Gains that our client can expect from a cab service are punctuality, the tranquility of knowing that he will arrive on time, the good treatment by the cab driver, the ease in the process of payment and reimbursement of costs.
Value proposition of our product or service
In this block we will learn what our organization can offer our customers to satisfy them.
Products & Services
What is the product or service we are offering our customers to help them carry out their activities?
In our case, the product we offer our customers is an application that allows them to hire a cab from their cell phone, know at what time they will arrive at their destination and have the trip charged directly to their company. Yes, we are talking about Cabify, or any of the apps that cab cooperatives have developed to compete with VTC services.
Source: Cabify official website
Pain relieves
Earlier I described some situations that can generate pain to our client. Now it is a matter of detailing how our product or service can contribute to reducing our customer’s frustrations.
It is important that we are specific and explain how we are going to do it and that we are even able to quantify the reduction of our client’s pain.
In this case the pains we avoid for the customer are uncertainty in lead time, predictability and the elimination of the always annoying expense sheet for your company. We can even quantify the reduction in time spent by the manager or his secretary in preparing expense sheets or the improvement in punctuality in attending meetings.
Gain creators
These are the benefits that the customer will obtain from using your product or service. As with pains, now is also the time to quantify and specify how our product or service can help our customer complete their task.
In addition to reducing several critical pains, Cabify also offers its customers a friendly and quality service, with cars that are always clean and available at the click of a button.
We have already defined the two blocks of the Value Proposition Canvas. It is an internal work, so validating it with the market and receiving feedback from customers is essential. Now I ask you, Do you know how to design the value proposition canvas of your product or service?
Focusing on market and customer needs will allow us to design a successful business model. Above we leave our template for you to challenge yourself and analyze well your customer and product or service.
