Building capabilities for customer centric decision-making using time to value

In our latest blog post relating to Intelligent CX, Curzon Analyst Milla Bradstock explores how to build capabilities for customer centric decision-making using Time to Value.

Time to Value, as a metric, initially rose to fame among software companies and its insights now drive improvements in a range of business contexts. In a customer context, it is described as the length of time between a customer purchasing a product or service and seeing the value of that action. Yet to untap the metric’s full potential, businesses must take a longer-term view of its application that goes beyond resolving customers’ immediate needs.

As T2V requires organisations to understand the value of their product or service from a customer’s perspective, it entrenches customer-centricity into the way businesses think about their services. At a time of rapidly shifting customer priorities, organisations that take this approach will be well placed to remain aligned to the needs of their customers.

Measuring Time to Customer Value

Tracking T2V builds a picture of your present customer journey, which will inform solutions to better fulfil customer needs. However, you can only track T2V if you know what ‘value’ is in the eyes of your customer. The definition of value will, of course, differ amongst your customers, but we can start to break down this metric into two sub metrics:

• Time to Basic Value – The time it takes for a customer to see the minimum amount of value from your product or service. Delivering on this metric doesn’t lead to customer loyalty necessarily, but will increase conversion. 

• Time to Exceeded Value – The time it takes for a customer to see enough value to exceed their expectations over a longer period of time. Delivering on this metric reduces churn, builds loyalty and increases customer lifetime value. 

For example: A travel app with an easy to use interface and intuitive search results will deliver on the Time to Basic Value metric. However, its Exceeded Value will be realised only when it helps a customer have a good holiday i.e. booking a place to stay using the platform.  

T2V helps businesses identify obstacles to customer satisfaction, which inform solutions for long-term value creation in the eyes of their customer. For SaaS businesses, onboarding is essential to their customers seeing value from their purchase, which creates the challenge of motivating customers to complete the process.

Focusing on accelerating T2V at this point in the customer journey can therefore decrease customer churn and improve satisfaction. Automated onboarding can be an effective tool, delivering frictionless setup and easy deployment through product tours, in-app messages and onboarding checklists. In tune with customer demands for instant service and ultimate convenience, this tool enables customers to seamlessly see the value of their purchase for themselves.

Implications for organisations

• Move the narrative from Customer Needs to Customer Value
• Focus on Customer Engagement beyond the initial purchase
• Measure and monitor customer engagement throughout the Customer Lifecycle 
• And, of course, ensure the engagement delights the customer every time

How we can help

T2V is just one of the tools that we employ to help our clients improve customer value. Businesses that invest now in strengthening their capabilities for meaningful customer engagement will build the resilience necessary for long-term success.

Get in touch to explore how we can help your organisation create lasting value for your customers.