Digital Transformation Game Plan

Chapter 2. Understanding Customer Value

Customer value forms the basis for your digital transformation; it is the beginning point. Understanding what value means to your customers is the input to the work you need to do and therefore informs how you need to redesign your organization. However, the definition of customer value is a little more elusive than most would assume.

We once were privileged to listen in on a few call-center calls at a large telecommunications company. A customer asked whether their service had been connected. The operator looked up on the system to see a connection at the exchange and answered in the affirmative. After a pause, the customer repeated themselves in a way that made the value aspect really obvious: “So I am about to drive for four hours to that location. If I cannot connect to the internet when I get there I will need to turn around and drive all the way back and still do my full day’s work. So, is my service connected?” In this case, what the customer valued was not whether a system thinks a connection at the exchange is on: this person valued whether they could access the internet from a particular location given that an eight-hour drive was at stake. The point is to always see value through the eyes of the customer.

There are two different lenses on customer value: the value a business believes they are delivering to the customers (in this case, the ability to know whether an internet connection is established to a premises); the “consequence” ...