How to Create a Seamless and Delightful Customer Experience

In my last article, 3 Growth Strategies JTBD Makes Easy, I gave a quick overview of the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) innovation approach so you could see how organizations use each strategy to drive innovation and growth in a systematic manner. The three growth strategies are:

1. 1. To grow a core market, help target customers get a core job done better
   2. To find and capitalize on other related markets, help customers get other related jobs done better
   3. To create a seamless and delightful customer experience, help customers obtain the value of your product or service better

Your market, business model, and objectives will indicate which of these 3 strategies might be most helpful for you.

Today, I’d like to illustrate how Franklin University used growth strategy #3 to improve their online doctoral programs and increase retention. (Check out the full case study co-authored with our friends at Franklin University here).

This 3rd strategy is often called a “consumption chain” study because it’s focused on understanding the various steps customers must go through to consume or obtain the value of your offering. Since Franklin is in the business of guiding its students through a curriculum in which students are constantly consuming material and obtaining services, this was the obvious strategy for them. Here are a few highlights from the case study:

The Challenge
Although Franklin has been offering undergraduate programs online for 20 years and master’s level programs online for over a decade, the doctorate online programs were only added recently. Doctorate programs present some unique challenges due to significant self-study and dissertation. The Franklin leadership team knew that they could not achieve their objectives for their doctorate programs through internal invention; they needed to hear directly from their adult learners to understand how to make improvements that mattered.

To better understand the doctoral students’ experience, the Division of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management launched an initiative to gain the Voice of the Doctoral Student. A similar effort had been completed for the undergraduate population which, with Reveal’s help, had improved full funnel conversion in those programs. Because of the University’s prior positive experience working with Urko and his team, along with the rigor of their Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) approach, partnering with Urko was the natural choice for the doctorate program study.

The Solution
After a couple of meetings, Franklin’s leadership team and Urko agreed on the following three objectives for the doctoral student study:

1. Identify opportunities for improvement throughout the student journey.

2. Determine why students are leaving the program in three specific stages of the student journey:
– After registering and before starting classes (to reduce the number of “balkers”).
– After starting classes and before completing three trimesters.
– After completing their course work and before completing their dissertation.

3. Advance the University’s aspiration of being the premier doctorate institution in the country for making academic achievement possible for the broadest community of learners.

To accomplish these objectives, Urko collaborated with Franklin’s Student Affairs and Enrollment Management team to recruit students for personal interviews. This enabled Reveal to interview a mix of prospective, current, and graduated students, as well as students who withdrew.

The Results
The findings revealed dozens of functional, emotional, and social jobs that doctoral students are trying to get done throughout the student journey but that were impeded by various challenges, as well as barriers that led some students to withdraw. These findings revealed themes that informed the University in how to improve its conversion strategies in the “getting started” process as well as how to develop a new doctoral retention model to support student success during the self-study and dissertation phase of the program. The results also informed the university in how to better align its operations with what students are trying accomplish.

While it’s impossible to determine the exact impact of the Reveal study alone since Franklin executed dozens of growth initiatives concurrently with the project, it’s clear that Reveal had an important role in this success. Overall, the University has successfully increased the number of accepted and registered students as well as its full-funnel conversion rate. Retention is currently hovering around 86%, which is very strong. These encouraging results speak to the importance of understanding the student experience and working to ensure that any barriers or challenges are removed wherever possible.

See more details about how Franklin improved their program and retention rates in the case study here.

“When I think about the results, I would categorize them in two ways. First, Urko provided actual recordings of conversations with students to us so that we could hear directly from them very pointed questions which helped us understand their experience. And that led to some very actionable outcomes. He both reinforced some things we knew we needed to address and change to make our student experience a little better. And then he also revealed new opportunities where we hadn’t gotten there in our conversations with students yet, and they had some real concrete insights for us about some things we might do to make things better and improve. The quality of the work, the conversations he was having with our prospective students and now our current students was very, very helpful, insightful, and actionable.”
– Lynne Rouzer, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Student Affairs& Enrollment Management

The JTBD strategy #3 can help any company deliver a better customer experience by studying the entire “consumption chain” (as Franklin did) or by targeting just one critical step, such as the “purchase” step.

For example, a medical device manufacturer used this strategy to better understand the purchasing decision of its target customers: hospitals. To help this client, we identified the various stakeholders in hospitals who are involved in the purchasing decision, and interviewed a sample of them to determine:

1. 1. The steps involved in the purchasing process
   2. Who is involved in each step of the purchasing process/decision and their relative power
   3. How the success of each step in the process is measured
   4. How transactional/strategic each hospital is when purchasing these devices

This information revealed opportunities for the client to create new value for specific stakeholders and the hospitals overall to increase sales.

Is there really any other way to master you markets than by gaining a solid understanding of what your customers are trying to accomplish and how they measure success?

In my next article, I’ll explain how you can use JTBD strategy #2 and illustrate it with more client examples.

Was this helpful? Drop me an email at uw@revealgrowth.com and let me know.