Offer & Experience Summary

Write down what you sell, then walk the whole path a customer takes, before and after the sale. Score each contact from the customer's side, set standards you can check, and fix the weakest link first.

Practice, not research: the customer journey is a well-grounded concept (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016), but touchpoint inventories and experience principles are practitioner technique, not tested instruments. The customer effort score comes from its originators and has no independent validation found (Dixon, Freeman & Toman, 2010). The net promoter score is contested as a predictor (Reichheld, 2003). Scales on this page are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• You sell a product or service and want one description of the offer and the experience that the whole team shares.
• Customers praise the product but leave after the first year, or complain about support and onboarding.
• You are about to change pricing, packages or the delivery model and want to see the effect on the experience.

Skip it when:

• You have not yet decided what you promise customers: use 6.7 Value Proposition Canvas.
• You need to price the offer, not describe it: use 6.22 Pricing Your Offer.

The offer is more than the product. Customers experience the whole arc of contacts with you, in phases before and after the sale, and the quality of that arc is built from touchpoints you only partly control (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). The concept is well grounded. The tools on top of it are craft: touchpoint lists and experience principles are practitioner technique. Measure with care too. The customer effort score was introduced with the claim that cutting effort predicts repurchase better than delighting customers, but the claim comes from the authors who introduced the measure (Dixon, Freeman & Toman, 2010). The net promoter score's claim to be the one number a company needs (Reichheld, 2003) is contested. Behavior, meaning retention, repeat purchase and churn, is the ground truth that survey scores only approximate.

So the page works from the outside in. The touchpoint map covers the stages after the sale because the delivered experience often weakens after the contract, where design attention stops. Each contact gets a quality score so weak links surface instead of averaging out. Standards must have a measure, or they stay decoration. And Step 5 leads with behavior, with survey scores as optional companions.

List what you sell, to whom and at what price. Say how the offer connects to the promise in 6.7 Value Proposition Canvas and the customer in 6.1.

Strong answer: "Standard package for owner-run clinics, 1,200 SEK a month (illustrative), setup included; Plus adds reminders by voice. We do not sell to chains." Not: "We offer a range of flexible solutions for all needs."

Who this offer is for and what it promises them (one sentence from 6.1 and 6.7):

Illustrative example: the business and all numbers are made up.

A small company in Tromsø rents out and services kayaks for guided tours to hotels. The owner suspects returning guides are a smaller group than they were.

Step 1: two offerings: seasonal rental to tour guides and a full-service package for hotels, with servicing before every trip. Rental is for independent guides; the package is for hotels with no equipment staff.

Step 2: finding us 4, comparing 4, buying 3 (the contract is long), first 30 days 2 (guides wait for fitting and gear check), using it 3, renewal 2 (nobody contacts customers before the season). Weakest: renewal, known because six of ten guides said no one wrote.

Step 3: promise: kayaks ready and fitted before the first trip. Measure: share of first trips with gear fitted the day before. Now: about half of trips in the last season.

Step 4: gap: no contact before the season. Fix: a message to every returning customer in February with a fitting date. Owner: the operations lead. Date: 1 February.

Step 5: track repeat guides per season and the reason when one does not return.