Product, Service, and Experience Strategy
Customers Demand
Your customers analyze you and everything you offer to determine if you deliver a great ROI: return on the time and money investment they make in you. As technology brings less friction and easier vendor migrations, ensure that your Experience Ecosystem has plenty of evidence that you are worth at least what they pay.
Customer experiences, opinion, and decisions are the ultimate outcomes. These have their roots in something customers rarely see: your company’s strategies around products, services, and experiences.
There’s a lot of product strategy advice that sounds like “read everything you can,” “talk to some customers,” “use your intuition,” “ship something and later learn if you should have shipped.” That’s not product strategy. That’s expensive guessing, often due to cycles of failure. Companies afraid to face and explain failure tried making it cool and trendy. Fail fast, fail more, learn from failure. But these companies usually learn nothing from a failure beyond, “People didn’t seem to want that.”
Real product strategy requires understanding your market and everybody in your Experience Ecosystem deeply enough that your decisions are based on evidence, not confidence. Confidence isn’t a strategy. Neither is guessing dressed up as “product sense.”
What is your strategy? Not just what do you plan to offer to customers. But why? Which problems are you solving? What do we understand about these problems? Did that information come from research or assumptions?
Delivering value and ROI starts with customer intelligence.
As every company moves faster and faster, fast is no longer your differentiator… and probably never was. Customer intelligence is the differentiator that creates disruptions and innovations.
The product, service, and experience strategies we build for our clients include key project-level components, including:
- The overarching strategy statement.
- Problem statements, written from the Experience Ecosystem’s perspectives, but taking into account the negative repercussions for the company.
- Root causes of the problem.
- Strategic North Stars that will guide value creation.
- Goals for the project that sees the strategy through.
- KPIs.
- Risks.
Delta CX delivers clear, well-thought-out project strategies that achieve clear goals for both your customers and your business. For clients tackling larger strategic questions, we can also deliver higher-level strategies addressing customer needs, business goals, and leaping over the competition. We have also designed business models for startups trying to find product-market fit.
Which Direction Should We Grow?
Most of our potential clients used to be CX and UX teams who needed training, augmentation, or a standalone project. For the last few years, we are getting more inquiries from:
- Startups struggling to find product-market fit, lost in cycles of guesses and failures.
- Scale-ups who found early adoption and success, but weren’t sure where to go from there.
- Chief Revenue Officers wanting to better understand users’ workflows, tasks, and needs so they can strategize their next wave of products and services.
- Companies moving into new markets, seeing a lot of funnel abandonment, and then realizing they didn’t know their new market as well as they thought.
- Marketing teams that could bring more and more traffic to a site, but couldn’t improve conversion rates.
- Companies wondering how, where, or if their target ICPs want AI in products and services.
Conversion, retention, and growth.
Delta CX specializes in outcome-focused techniques designed to win and keep customers. We do this not through deception, tricks, or increasing user friction. We want your greatness to sell itself. Your Experience Ecosystem should stay and pay naturally and organically, not because we fooled them or “the fine print lets us do this.”
We are Strategists and Innovators. Your Research and Development (R&D) team. We invent fresh solutions for old and new problems. We welcome the big, hairy, complex problems and ecosystems.
Systems Thinking, Service Design, and
Most consultants and agencies are happy to fix the thing you pointed at. They are happy to run a few workshops and build a high-level customer journey map.
We see “the thing you pointed at” as a starting point. It’s a signal, symptom, or consequence. We’ll need to find the root causes. We know that real improvements and change require fresh clarity and understanding. Delta CX puts the “strategy” back in “product strategy,” and the “discovery” back in “product discovery.”
A checkout problem might be a UX problem. Or a problem related to trust, pricing, content, onboarding, your value proposition, some combination of these or something else.
- Our client asked us to fix the checkout, but we noticed that most of the site didn’t make the services, pricing, or value clear. The site also seemed written to attract the least desirable ICP: spends the least, needs the most Customer Support, and tends to be the least loyal. We also learned where trust is broken on their website.
- Our client asked us to show an online portal concept to participants whose problems were mostly caused by FedEx and UPS not delivering as promised. We explained where the portal could create some improvements for customers, but the real fixes are far upstream. We suggested solutions that keep the root causes from happening.
We bring systems thinking and service design to every engagement.
That means understanding your entire Experience Ecosystem: internal people, processes, and systems as well as customer and user experiences, decisions, workflows, and tasks. We investigate relationships, collaborators, knowledge, habits, and where trust is made or broken.
Resist the temptation to put some tape on what’s broken, and kick it down the road with “we’ll fix it later” claims. Let’s dive in and address all of the root causes, symptoms, consequences, and outcomes.