Customer Service Glossary
What Is Customer Value Proposition?
A customer value proposition is one of the most critical elements of a business’s marketing and sales efforts. Customer value propositions help consumers understand why they should choose one business’s product or service over a competitor’s. Further, a customer value proposition offers an at-a-glance clarification of the value, benefits, and promises provided by a product or service.
Simply put, the strength of a company’s customer value proposition directly relates to the competitive advantage it has over other businesses in its industry. For this reason, taking the time to craft a compelling customer value proposition and pairing it with high-quality products, exemplary customer service, and personalized care can improve conversion rates, sales, and revenue in the long run.
Even so, many businesses fail to highlight their customer value proposition – or write one at all. To successfully leverage your expertise and authority, you should display your customer value proposition in a prominent location on your website, social media profiles, and in other customer touchpoints.
How Does Customer Service Impact Customer Value Propositions?
At first glance, customer service departments may seem irrelevant to customer value propositions. However, like marketing teams and salespeople, customer service departments are more than a necessity.
Instead, support centers, managers, and agents represent a vital and valuable business opportunity. In fact, exemplary customer service may even be the only competitive advantage a company has in a crowded market.
Customer service departments benefit a company’s customer value proposition in two key ways, as follows.
1. Connecting Brands with Customers
Customer service agents are often the first human interaction that online shoppers have with a business. With that in mind, agents should offer a thorough understanding of their customer base’s emotions, pain points, and preferences to guide them through the purchasing process, convert leads into loyal customers, and improve retention rates through personalized care.
2. Boosting Brand Perception
Quality products and services go a long way in developing a positive brand perception, but poor customer service can have the opposite effect.
By pairing top-notch consumer products and services with exemplary customer care, brands can enhance their customer value proposition through a satisfactory experience from start to finish.
How to Develop A Customer Value Proposition
Taking the time to develop a customer value proposition is well worth the effort. Still, it’s not always easy to consolidate the incentives and benefits that companies promise their customers into a single, snappy line.
Successful customer value propositions must be intuitive, straightforward, and unique to impact customers. In addition, it should be catchy and easily incorporated into marketing efforts. Finally, it should fit into the traditional structure of a CVP, featuring a bold headline with a subheading in paragraph format that highlights the main incentives of the brand, product, or service.
To create a customer value proposition, consider the five following steps.
1. Examine the Customer’s Pain Points
Customers shop to fulfill a desire or satisfy a need, also known as a pain point. As such, your customer value proposition should highlight their main desire or problem before presenting the perfect solution.
2. Identify the Product’s Differentiating Factors
Next, briefly describe the benefits of your product or service, i.e., the factors that set it apart from your competition.
3. Explain the Product’s Value
After identifying the benefits of your product, explain why the benefits are valuable to the customer.
4. Connect the Value to the Problem
Once your customer understands the value of your product or service, align the value with their problem or desire. If you find that the value and problem don’t align, revisit the steps until you find a viable need and solution.
5. Wrap It Up
Finally, complete your value proposition by including a feature that makes you stand out from your competitors. This may include additional services, lower costs, or other factors that would convince customers to convert.
Improving Customer Value Propositions with Customer Service
Customer value propositions are one of the most powerful tools that businesses can use to gain a competitive advantage in an overcrowded market. Though customer service departments seem removed from the marketing, sales, and product development aspects of business, agents can work synergistically to add value, assist customers, and fuel brand loyalty.