🧅 Solving the right problem for the right reasons — with dimensions and onions
Introduction
Sometimes organisations and companies get the great idea to try to lengthen their customer journey. Which often means collaborating with other companies or starting offering things which might not be a part of their core business.
One common mistake is typically that you offer things which your company has no bandwidth to execute well enough to be competitive with others, who might have that service as their core business. Another problem might be that the offer is too far away from the core business and the trust from the customers is just not there. I think this regularly happens because we typically miss one dimension when we do research around this topic — We discover a pain, and believe if the pain exists in the realm of our customer journey it needs to be solved by us, or that the entire experience with our brand will be flawless if we just get rid of that pain. But what we forget is that all pains can’t be solved by us and shouldn’t. They exist for different reasons and should then be approached differently.
When we look at the double and triple diamond process, we say that we should not only solve the problem the right way, we need to solve the right problem. And what I’m adding here is that we also have to solve it for the right reasons, not just mindlessly solve it because it exists.
In this article, I will explain a little matrix I often use to visualise the research behind this a bit better.
Pains, problems and solving them for the right reason
Mapping your companies different products, services, and offers you can do by yourself within your organisation, and then validate them with users and customers. Or you can do it the other way around. I typically end up doing a bit of both. You typically have a set of collaborations and ideas you think might work to widen or increase the engagement with your customers. If you already have ideas, you can do a fast and easy card sorting with users. Let them rank all of those ideas from High probability to Low probability, that they would like your company to solve for a specific problem, or offer a specific product. But what you need to add, is the Why. What is the main reason they do a certain activity, and why might it be a pain?
Your card sorting could exist of a wide range of different ideas and things that you might offer your customer. Such as Products, Business Offers, Services and so on.
The onion
When you have a result of the card sorting, you should to visualise it. In the core of the onion comes the products, services and offers which the customers want your help to solve, and which feels completely natural for them to buy from you. And the further out you go in the layers, the further it goes from the organisation's core business, which means you need to work much harder to convert them to buy this from you. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth it?
And do you fully understand why they might want your help solving this or not? Because it might not be in the customers’ best interest for you to solve it for them because they need to do it themselves for various reasons.
Onion with layers
Allow me to explain that a bit more — The customers might want you to solve some of their problems because they are complicated, and they would rather not get it wrong because it might end up with unwanted consequences. And other problems might be big pains, but they need to solve it themselves because it adds satisfaction, it adds to their self-esteem, or it might be fun and satisfying in other ways. So don’t take that away from them.
It is a bit like the Shake and Bake case. Where the company had to add user steps because just putting the product it in the oven was not satisfying enough, the home-baker needed to do some steps for the users so they would feel satisfied and accomplished. And it might be the same thing with your product or service.
Let’s exemplify this a bit. Imagine you’re a company who sells insurance. You’re relevant only when an accident has happened. But you want to be present more often in your customer's life and context. So you start thinking about what you can offer them to increase engagement. Maybe collaborating with carpenters, cleaners, electricians, and gardeners might be nice. These are all things a homeowner needs, and you have discovered that a lot of these things are pains and take up valuable time in your customers’ life.
The Onion model can have several layers depending on how many services and collaborations your company has. For this visualisation, the most important thing is to map how your customer perceives the offers, services, or products in relation to how probable it is that they would like your company to solve the problem. Or the willingness-to-pay that specific offer from your company.
In the first image, you see the mapping of the different services. In the secondary image, you see them mapped with the reasons why the customer wants, or does not want, you to help them with it.
This Onion showcases the different layers with your companies different collaborations, services offers but without visualising the core reasons to why your customer wants your help or not want your help
This third and last onion add the dimension reason. The reason to why your customer wants your help and why they might not want your help.
These reasons need to come from your research. It might be fewer, it might be more.
🫱🏼🫲 I want help with this because I trust you and your expertise.
😭 I want help with this because I can’t solve this on my own or don’t know how to.
😑. I want you to help with his because it is so boring.
🥰 I will do this because it is fun
💰 I will do this on my own because it will be a better deal
💪🏼 I will do this because it empowers me
Knowing the reasons and thoughts behind to why your customers want your help or not, might guide you on how to prioritise and how much effort you need to make it succeed. It might also point you in the right direction on how you need to do it to move it from the third layer to the second layer and so on.
And the power lies not only in knowing when and how to act, it is also valuable to know when you shouldn’t act.
