This Is EDVC

What sets two power drills apart isn’t the hole in the wall. It is the experience of drilling that hole. But not just that. It is also the experience of receiving the drill, reading the packaging, opening the box, learning how to use it, charging it, changing bits, childproofing it, accidentally dropping it on the floor and (maybe) having to repair it. Each of these moments has the potential to delight or frustrate, to win a fan or lose a customer. Experience-Driven Value Creation is about turning these moments into reasons why your brand becomes your customers‘ favourite.

What follows is the executive summary of a comprehensive introduction to Experience-Driven Value Creation (EDVC). To explore how you can use EDVC to grow your small or medium-sized business, check out our visualized introduction here: https://baselift.de/this-is-edvc/

Experience-Driven Value Creation (EDVC) is a framework for developing customer-relevant solutions and lasting brand value by leveraging a company’s distinctive capabilities and perspectives. Specifically tailored to the operational realities of small and medium sized companies, EDVC blends key aspects of design strategy, brand strategy and innovation discovery into one concise and actionable process.

At its core, EDVC places the discrepancy between the target customer’s expectations at each moment of her journey and the conceivable ideal experience at the center of the company’s value creation strategy. Put simply: EDVC addresses the question, „How far are we from delivering the best possible experience to our customers, and how can we use this gap as a starting point for creating relevant value?“

Using customer expectations as the baseline, the EDVC approach seeks solutions that eliminate frustration, exceed adequacy and generate delight by identifying and optimising the individual value drivers that influence the customer’s evaluation at every critical moment of the customer journey.

Three fundamental value drivers shape how customers evaluate their experience:

• What a company offers – its enabling products, services and touchpoints
• How it does it – the specific execution of the solution
• Why it matters – the brand’s underlying purpose, ideology and emotional value

EDVC divides the customer journey into four experience dimensions:

• the problem experience – the moment or scenario a problem or desire arises
• the brand experience – how people perceive a company
• the customer experience – all interactions between a (potential) customer and a company
• the product experience – every moment of interaction with a product, service or touchpoint

Across these dimensions, the EDVC approach applies a four-step methodology:

1. Identifying pain points that lead to frustration.
2. Assessing customer expectations as a benchmark for improvement.
3. Envisioning the ideal experience to set strategic goals.
4. Optimising value drivers to bring this vision to life.

Key element of the EDVC approach is the value creation triad. While companies can enhance customer experiences and evaluation by optimizing individual value drivers – through innovation (a new what), design (a better how) and branding (a meaningful why) – creating above-average relevance, loyalty and preference requires combining the three value drivers into a cohesive value creation triad at as many points along the customer journey as possible. That means ensuring each customer touchpoint delivers not just functional What-value, but also customer centered and differentiated How-value and Why-value.