Value - where, how, who, when

"The fact that customers and firms have different value-creating processes implies value is created in different domains and is no longer entirely in the firm’s control. Managers are increasingly aware of the need to understand customers’ roles in firms’ activities, such as those evident in service process blueprinting or customer journeys. The increasing roles of customer participation amplifies the need tounderstanding how customers orchestrate value.
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Rather than the components of a service being absolute, they are treated as relative to alternative services and evaluated against an individual reference point. In other words, aspects beyond the exchange, product, service or interaction may constitute value as experienced by the customer. Sometimes value elements are invisible to the firm and independent of the firm. Moreover, value is not only inherent in the offering itself but also in elements only indirectly related to a specific service provider. In other words, customer value can be conceptualized as including both customer-defined and relativistic aspects with value-adding or value-decreasing characteristics.
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Where is value created? Researchers suggest that value is formed in three domains: in the company’s world through value-in-exchange; through co-creation through customer-company interactions, that is, joint value creation; and in the customers’ world through value-in-use, otherwise known as independent value creation. Value arises in customers’ internal and external contexts based on both individual and collective elements. Hence, value is not only based on customers’ experiences with provider-created elements but can emerge outside the domain of the service provider in the customer’s world. We will now turn to a discussion of how value is created, who creates value, and when value created.
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How is value created? As mentioned, value is seen as inherent in the interaction between the customer and provider, but value also emerges through interactions with other customers. Recognizing the impact of other customers on value formation, we acknowledge that value is created based on individual and communal experiences.
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Who creates value? Value co-creation research highlights the important contributions of the customer to the value creation process. Recently there has been a shift away from dyadic value creation to a focus on networks and systems, to the interaction among multiple actors, and more recently to ecosystems. Despite this, practitioner and researcher attention to communal and networked value is low. The lack of attention to the communal influence of customers on value is problematic, as different forms of communities increasingly network and link customers and customer-to-customer interactions are increasingly relevant sources of value.
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When is value created? Classic service research focuses on service encounters which implies that value is created solely within the service interaction. In contrast, a relationship marketing perspective emphasizes a longer timeframe that includes both before and after purchase. Irrespective of these differences in length, the underlying backdrop is the customers’ experience of the time of the service process. More recently, a broader notion of time has been called for that includes consideration of the past, present, and the future of the customer, not just the service process. Accepting that value is created not only in the interaction between the customer and the provider (and service system) extends the time-frame of value to the cumulated reality as experienced by the customer."

Trechos retirados de "Strategies for creating value through individual and collective customer experiences" de Kristina Heinonen, Colin Campbell e Sarah Lord Ferguson, publicado por Business Horizons 2018.

"the emerging organizational form for the 21st century"

Ao ler "Creating the competitive edge: A new relationship between operations management and industrial policy" publicado por Journal of Operations Management 49-51 (2017), encontro outro trecho em sintonia com Normann e Ramirez:

"The theoretical underpinning of manufacturing strategy has moved from process choice to a resource-based view, reflecting the growing importance of learning, innovation and idiosyncratic firm- and network-level capabilities.
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The unit of analysis in manufacturing strategy has shifted from the plant or firm to the supply network, with supply chain management growing as a domain of OM research from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s
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Operations are now seen by some as fundamentally inter-organizational. Furthermore, whereas plant-level manufacturing strategy approaches and, to some extent, supply chain management sought to design and control the whole system directly, fragmented networks are perhaps better understood as complex adaptive systems in which any one firm has only local and partial control... the emerging organizational form for the 21st century, rather than the multi-firm network, is the ‘collaborative community’. As such, the ‘institutional architecture’ in which such adaptive systems and communities operate becomes an increasingly important ingredient in manufacturing firms' business landscape."

 Richard Normann e Rafael Martinez em "Designing Interactive Strategy" escrevem:

"strategy is the way a company defines its business and links together the only two resources that really matter in today’s economy: knowledge and relationships or an organization’s competencies and customers.
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But in a fast-changing competitive environment, the fundamental logic of value creation is also changing and in a way that makes clear strategic thinking simultaneously more important and more difficult. Our traditional thinking about value is grounded in the assumptions and the models of an industrial economy. According to this view, every company occupies a position on a value chain. Upstream, suppliers provide inputs. The company then adds value to these inputs, before passing them downstream to the next actor in the chain, the customer (whether another business or the final consumer). Seen from this perspective, strategy is primarily the art of positioning a company in the right place on the value chain—the right business, the right products and market segments, the right value-adding activities.
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Today, however, this understanding of value is as outmoded as the old assembly line that it resembles and so is the view of strategy that goes with it. Global competition, changing markets, and new technologies are opening up qualitatively new ways of creating value."

E repito a citação de ontem:

"In so volatile a competitive environment, strategy is no longer a matter of positioning a fixed set of activities along a value chain. Increasingly, successful companies do not just add value, they reinvent it. Their focus of strategic analysis is not the company or even the industry but the value-creating system itself, within which different economic actors—suppliers, business partners, allies, customers—work together to co-produce value. Their key strategic task is the reconfiguration of roles and relationships among this constellation of actors in order to mobilize the creation of value in new forms and by new players. And their underlying strategic goal is to create an ever-improving fit between competencies and customers." 

Relação é muito mais do que simpatia

"Relationship in business is not about brand value, brand awareness, linkages on social media or knowing the name of your customer’s dog. Relationship in this context is knowing what makes your customer successful in terms of positive outcomes when they engage your company and how you contribute to the value outcome. Customer’s purchase things to achieve particular outcomes that drive value. Relationship in business is about knowing what those desired outcomes may be even before the customer knows it themselves. Relationship building is about more than just one customer at a time. It is about the aggregation of knowledge that can be achieved by direct participation in post-sale activities with a broad array of customers.
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We found that companies who valued having customer success-based or outcome-based relationships with their customers came to understand their customer’s markets better. They were better able to anticipate needs and react to market changes more rapidly than their competitors."

Trechos retirados de "Powered by Customers: Relationship Is Key to Surviving 100 Years in Business" de Douglas Morse e publicado por Journal of Creating Value 1(1) 101 –107

"Posso ajudar?" - E isto, muda tudo! (parte III)

Parte I e parte II

"seller companies are too preoccupied with their own products and tend not to make a sufficient effort to learn about individual customers and how they think.
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value emerges when a service becomes embedded in the customer’s context, activities, practices and experiences together with the service company’s activities. ... it is important to understand how value emerges also from the customers’ mental and emotional experiences and what the customers are doing to accomplish their goals. In other words, a more holistic understanding of the customer’s life, practices and experiences (in which service is embedded) is needed. This requires that companies build their businesses on an indepth insight into customers’ activities, practices, experiences, and context, and analyze what implications these have for the service. ... companies should learn what processes customers are involved in, in their own context, and what different types of inputs (both physical and mental) customers need to support these.
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The typical provider-dominant way of developing offerings have been to start from the offering and then identify the customers’ activities where the company can fit in. The recent trend of integrating design thinking into service business development turns the process over by starting from deeply understanding customers’ activities, and then based on deep customer insight, ideating and designing new ways to support customers’ activities and embed the service in customers’ existing and future contexts, activities, and experiences...
In other words, a service is designed with the customers, not just for them"

Agora, é comparar a visão tradicional com "Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends for 2015 - What’s Driving the Market"
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A concentração na oferta, na técnica, no serviço... e o ponto de vista dos clientes? Em que é que precisam de ajuda?

Trecho retirado de "Adapting Business Model Thinking to Service Logic: An Empirical Study on Developing a Service Design Tool" de Katri Ojasalo e Jukka Ojasalo

"Posso ajudar?" - E isto, muda tudo!

Parte I.

"During the past decade, the academic discussion has strongly shifted away from GDL and the traditional thinking about the sequential value creation process to new business logics that emphasize customers’ active role in value creation.
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The service-dominant logic (SDL), which stresses the co-creation of value, value-in-use and value-in-context, has been proposed as an alternative view to the traditional notion of value-in-exchange.
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The central idea of the SDL is that there is no value until the offering is used and experienced by the customer. The SDL argues that a company can offer value propositions and value is always co-created.
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customers are value creators during value-generating processes and in value-supporting interactions. Companies are facilitators and co-creators that engage themselves in the customers’ processes. In other words, customers not only determine the value, but also control the value creation in their processes.
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when focusing on value-in-use, the supplier offers a value proposition that can support customer’s value creation processes, but it is the customer who actualizes the value. In other words, the role of a company has shifted from being a producer of value to a supporter of value, since customers are in charge of their value creation. Thus, adopting the service logic means that the supplier company searches for possibilities to understand and support the customers’ value creation processes.
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Value emerges rather than being delivered and service providers can only create resources and means to facilitate customers to create value for themselves
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Understanding the customer experience also before and after an interaction and knowing how value is experienced in the customer’s own context gives companies opportunities to help their customers to better fulfil their daily tasks."

A abordagem mental ao desafio das empresas servirem os seus clientes é muito diferente... COMO POSSO AJUDAR?
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Não tem a ver com a oferta que a empresa tem para impingir, não tem a ver com os activos que tem para fazer rodar, não tem a ver com as regras que lhe dão jeito.
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E isto, muda tudo!


Trecho retirado de "Adapting Business Model Thinking to Service Logic: An Empirical Study on Developing a Service Design Tool" de Katri Ojasalo e Jukka Ojasalo

"É preciso uma estratégia para o país!"

"Value is a feeling, not a calculation"
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Qual o peso das emoções, dos sentimentos, na percepção de valor?

"…Many organizations talk about their desire to have ‘loyal’ Customers, as they know this is the most cost-effective way to make more money. However, ironically they seem to miss the fact that loyalty is built on (an) emotional bond. Very rarely do you hear an organization talking about Customer emotions; instead they talk about price, deliveries, speed etc. Research shows over 50% of a Customer’s experience is about how a Customer feels."

Em Portugal é comum ouvirem-se vozes a pedirem uma estratégia para o país, uma orientação central, um planeamento bem intencionado feito por uns senhores indicados pelo governo da ocasião. Como é que uma orientação central de gente longe de onde a acção ocorre pode fazer a diferença? Como é que Muggles podem criar magia? Não me canso de chamar a atenção para a importância de desenvolver relações amorosas com clientes, com fornecedores e com produtos.
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Roger Martin fala sobre isto em "What's Thwarting American Innovation? Too Much Science, says Roger Martin:

""The business world is tired of having armies of analysts descend on their companies," he says. "You can't send a 28-year-old with a calculator to solve your problems."
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The march of science is good, and corporations are being run more scientifically. But what they analyze is the past. And if the future is not exactly like the past, or there are things happening that are hard to measure scientifically, they get ignored. Corporations are pushing analytical thinking so far that it's become unproductive. The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers."

 Por isso, é tão comum os académicos preverem a desgraça, e os empresários, muitos deles sem curso, ao mesmo tempo, descobrirem uma alternativa para um futuro.

Estratégia e relacionamento com os clientes

Uma empresa tinha o seu modelo de negócio bem montado. Tudo estava a correr bem, apesar da lentidão portuguesa, a empresa crescia, tinha boas margens e os concorrentes iam caindo como tordos.
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Enquanto a concorrência usava o preço mais baixo como a proposta de valor, a empresa aprendeu a dar cartas com um negócio assente na representação de marcas topo de gama associados a um superior serviço de customização da solução e do produto.
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A empresa, independentemente do tipo de cliente e do tipo de produto, tinha um serviço único para todos os clientes, todos mereciam e eram servidos como clientes-premium.
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Gostam deste último pormenor? Eu também não, contudo, as margens permitiam esta abordagem.
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No último ano as convulsões económicas do nosso país provocaram um corte no paradigma e originaram uma migração de valor e um acentuar da polarização do mercado: continua-se a vender o produto-premium; desaparece quase por completo a procura do produto-intermédio que migra para o produto mais barato.
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As margens caem... O que vai fazer a empresa?
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Fácil!
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Primeiro: caracterizar os clientes:

• clarificar muito bem o que é um cliente-alvo do segmento premium;
• estabelecer que soluções e produtos se enquadram nesse segmento premium;
• clarificar muito bem o que é um cliente-alvo do segmento low-cost (hard-sell);
• estabelecer que soluções e produtos se enquadram nesse segmento low-cost (hard-sell);

Segundo: definir para cada segmento os processos:

• divulgar serviço junto de cliente-alvo;
• receber e tratar potencial encomenda;
• apresentar e seguir proposta;
• customizar e entregar.

Terceiro: definir competências dos intervenientes em cada binómio segmento-processo e preparar as pessoas para a transição.

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Nem de propósito, isto encaixa com a leitura do capítulo 5 "Creating Competitive Advantage with Relationship Strategies" de "Customer Relationship Management" de Kaj Storbacka e Jarmo Lehtinen.

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"Since all customers are different, relationships evolve differently. Thus, it is unlikely that all relationships would benefit from being managed in the same way. Most companies, however, manage their relationships using the same process, regardless of whether or not they have grouped their customers according to different criteria.

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Competitive advantage is a result of relationship strategies that in a superior way support the value creation of customers. Developing competitive advantage therefore includes the differentiation of relationships, i.e applying different processes to different relationships.

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Providers need to determine the different phases in their customer relationships, the structures needed to manage processes in each phase, and the types of exchanges required by various relationships.

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To choose a strategy, the provider needs to have a thorough understanding of how the customer creates value in his own processes as well as a clear vision of how provider competence can support customer value creation.

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The problem in many companies is that all relationships are handled according to the same formula. In other words, companies think in terms of serving their average customers. This type of average customer seldom exists.  (Moi ici: O fantasma estatístico) At its worst, this kind of thinking can lead to a large share of the customer base being served by a process that is too complicated and that customers are not able to appreciate. Conversely, truly valuable relationships are managed by a process which is too simple due to a lack of resources. Relationship strategies can therefore be thought of as tools for allocating resources."

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E a sua empresa?

Subir na escala de valor

Uma imagem e um texto que condensa um conjunto de conceitos relevantes para quem se preocupa com a criação de valor.

"The customer value accumulates as the satisfied needs advance from utility to psychic, as the customer benefits offered transcend tangibles to intangibles, as the nature of the relationship between the customer and the supplier develops from transaction to interaction, and as the customer treatment shifts from being a consumer to being a person. This accumulation of value may take one of four distinct forms that can be arranged from low to high as follows functionality; solution; experience; and meaning.
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Functionality means an outcome that the customer obtains from basic (and facilitating) product features. Solution obtained by extending the offering to include support features that cover some of the activities the customer usually performs to, for example, acquire, install, use, and maintainthe product. Experience involves adding intangibles to the tangible offering of the firm. The customer becomes part of the transformation process rather than mere recipient of its end result. Experience takes into account not only the rational expectations of the customer concerning functional attributes of the product or service but more importantantly the emotional elements derived by the total experience.
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Meaning magnifies the worth to the experience. It thinks the immediateness of the experience to the durability of strongly held personal philosophy. It takes the experience to new heights of self-actualization. The difference between experience and meaning is that the former can be understood as "living through" something; while the latter can be of as "living for" some purpose."
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Trechos retirados de "Customer value: a review of recent literatura and an integrative configuration" de Azaddin Khalifa publicado na revista "Management Decision" Vol 42, No. 5, 2001.

Uma pessoa pode fazer a diferença...

... uma grande diferença.

• "The Power of one Person ... and Your Corporate Culture"
• "Destroying Customer Value"

Esperteza saloia

Em Março de 2007, um iluminado, um fanático do corte nos custos teve uma ideia luminosa, despedir toda a gente, todos os colaboradores, para contratar em seu lugar, caloiros mais baratos: "Circuit City Cuts Wages to Juice Profits".


Em Dezembro de 2007: "In the world of pricey consumer electronics, where customer service is arguably as important as quality products, Circuit City Stores is missing the mark and further eroding its profits.
At the beginning of this year, the specialty retailer fired 3,400 of its highest paid, and presumably best qualified and performing, employees, as part of a broad cost-cutting program. That's led to substantial deterioration in customer service" em "Circuit City Gets Crushed"

Em resumo um verdadeiro "Cost Cutting Nightmare"

Julgo que foi por causa de gente capaz de tomar decisões como esta, que Sutton escreveu o livro "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't "

Valor para os clientes

A produtividade pode ser representada pela equação:

Em termos monetários o valor percebido traduz-se num preço.

“…Value as perceived by customers is a ratio of perceived benefits to be received from a product to perceived sacrifices incurred to acquire and use (receive satisfaction from) the product.”“Customers tend to compare the perceived value of alternative products and select the product with the greatest perceived value.”

“The strategic approach described in this paper is somewhat different from a TQM customer satisfaction approach in that it considers customer sacrifices, not just benefits.”

“The customer value approach requires a number of determinations:
First, the organization must assess customer benefits and sacrifices and the relative importance of each to the customer in order to determine customer value.
Then the organization should compare itself to its competitors.
Finnaly, it must determine how best to increase its customer perceived value to gain competitive advantage.”
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“The customer value paradigm is replacing the customer satisfaction paradigm in management strategy. The customer satisfaction approach focuses on how to satisfy existing customers better. The customer value approach focuses on how to improve an organization’s competitive position, attract and retain targeted customers, and create shareholder wealth.”


Trechos retirados de “Managing Customer Value” de Michael T. Saliba, e Caroline M. Fisher. (Quality Progress, Junho 2000).