Mapping Customer Relationships and Channels

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From the course by University of Virginia

Innovating with the Business Model Canvas

20 ratings

University of Virginia

Innovating with the Business Model Canvas

20 ratings

Have you ever gotten really excited about reading or writing a business plan? You might have started out excited, but I’m going to bet you didn’t stay that way. Let’s be honest- business plans are boring and mostly ignored. The beauty of the one-page Business Model Canvas is that it drives meaningful focus. It helps us organize our ideas and have better discussions by forcing specificity and bringing linkages between key business drivers to the foreground. Innovation requires one hand being very focused on a fundamental need or problem while the other hand quickly tests different solutions. For this, the Business Model Canvas is very innovation friendly: It's a lot easier to tweak the model and try things with something that's sitting on a single page In this course, you’ll learn key tools from the worlds of design thinking and Lean Startup to approach the Canvas with thoughtfulness, focus, and above all a test-driven approach to business model innovation.

From the lesson

Focusing for Profitability and Growth

How do you avoid the distractions that keep companies from innovating their way to organic growth? The best recipe is a hyper focus on finding product/market fit and scaling it. Fortunately, the Canvas is a great way to create that focus. We’ll start the course by looking at the jobs you do for customers and how your particular propositions drive revenue. We’ll also look at how you link those with focused customer journeys to keep these customer-centric linkages healthy and growing.

Sculpting the Customer Journey: AIDAOR3:55

Storyboarding AIDAOR7:06

Delivering the Customer Journey through Customer Relationships and Channels2:54

Mapping Customer Relationships and Channels6:09

Persona/Proposition Fit and Revenue Drivers6:27

Scaling Product/Market Fit with the Growth Hacking Canvas5:27

Creating a Culture of Experimentation1:12

Meet the Instructors

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow
Darden School of Business

All right. Let's walk through a simplified example of

this whole thing where maybe the needs we have

for the customer relationships and the channels we use to

deliver them change over the course of the customer journey.

Let's say, I buy a new washing machine.

I decide that I need a new washing machine,

the old one breaks.

And probably, at least I think for me the first thing I would do is go online.

This is me looking at my phone maybe and this is our kind of attention.

Step I do a Google search,

best washing machine or something like that and maybe I read

some blogs by third parties about which washing machine is good.

Maybe I see some material or an ad in that context that engages my interest.

I have this desire to just get this done,

but do a good job so I don't disappoint my wife.

And what happens then?

Probably, at least in my case,

I want to go see these things in person.

I just need to kind of look at- I can get the dimensions, but I want to see it work.

I maybe want to talk to somebody about it so I go to, let's say,

Sears, that's a kind of big box retailer in the United States.

And I ask the sales rep about the washing machine.

This is the sales rep policy,

they have spiky hair and he or she is explaining the washing machine to me.

This is, I would say,

where the action happens,

I don't know why I pluralize that.

Action, where I'm hopefully going to make a decision and buy this washing machine.

And so from a channel's perspective,

what we're seeing here is that this is sort of,

the Web, you know,

maybe third parties or some kind of content strategy is the channel through

which we're delivering this because the relation is a little bit of backward looking.

Honestly it should really go this way,

but the type of relationship we're going to have here is,

I would say, from the standpoint of the person who makes the washing machine interact.

And over here, I would say it is personal service.

Meaning that there is a person involved because that's what happens at the retailer.

And that's what we need here at the action step.

And then let's say I buy one of these,

someone is going to bring it to me and probably install

it and which I think is the case for most people.

And so what kind of relationship would that be?

I would also say personal service or maybe even I kind of

know who's coming so I can arrange a time with them,

which would be dedicated personal service in the sense that,

I know who this person is in advance.

And the channel is sort of authorized

service people who maybe are third party contractors.

And so this third party contractor takes

a washing machine and let's say this is the pipe they deal with.

You know, sorting it out and putting it in and making sure it's tested and okay.

And then what happens for parcel service.

Maybe I can call the manufacturer or maybe there's

even another step somewhere here where I go on the Web to register my washing machine.

So I go back to more of a kind of relationship like this.

But perhaps there's also a call center because we feel

that people have questions and we want to be able to answer them as the manufacturer.

That would be the relationship type.

There would be personal service and the channel would be the manufacturer's call center.

And if we don't really think about this,

if we don't think about it in advance and we don't think about

how we'll test whether this is really working or not,

we can potentially deliver a customer journey.

It doesn't make sense.

It doesn't work well.

And a bunch of stuff in the canvas that obviously is going to be equally pointless.

So how does this work for Enable Quiz?

Well, the customer relationships they think they're going to

have are dedicated personal service for the large accounts.

There's a typo here.

And for small accounts,

they're just going to sell over the Web.

And this is a hypothesis because Enable Quiz is new

and they haven't reached really the customer creation stage yet let's say.

But that's okay.

Whatever your working idea is get done on the canvas so everybody knows what you're

trying to test and can look at how everything hangs together and whether it makes sense.

Now for promotion, they might use Google AdWords

or we saw them hoping for kind of a viral engine with LinkedIn,

people sharing about the service.

And then for sales,

they will use Direct Sales and maybe sign contracts with

big companies and the smaller accounts will go over the Web.

And then what happens after sales, well,

they're going to use their Internal Support team and they will maybe,

and that's hence the question marks here.

Maybe use LMS Partners or Consultancies.

LMS stands for learning management system.

This is a piece of enterprise software that deals

with the general process of learning and skills management.

And maybe Enable Quzz finds that it works well to go

in with one of these places that's handling sort of

the bigger question of skills management.

And maybe they find some consultancies that have a scope driven business model,

where they go in and help the customers with their overall skills assessment program.

Those are just some hypotheses about

this for Enable Quiz and why they think they might make sense.

And you can see this recorded on the canvas.

We have customer relationships recorded here and channels recorded over here.

What I would do is record these on your canvas and make sure you can link this back to

the customer journeys that you've either tested or at least

kind of hypothesized through storyboarding to see if it makes sense.

Really step through the whole journey and make sure that the customer relationships

that you need are being well serviced by the channels that you select.

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