What is Time To Value and why is it important for your product
Time To Value applies to the amount of time it takes for a client before realizing they are obtaining value from a product. It is the company’s responsibility to squeeze Time To Value as short as possible, so the clients reach conversion as soon as possible.
Your product’s value is what your client expects to receive from it. We need to understand how long it takes for the client who acquires the product or service to see the value and return on investment of what they bought.
Concerning communication and the way we disclose ideas is a promise about how the product will be and clients anticipate that promise, so we have to be able to meet expectations.
Time To Value in services
When what we sell is not a product, but a service in a pay per use format (Software as a Service or SaaS), Time to Value takes up an even greater importance. This concept has led us to evolve from the standard lifelong license to a pay per use model.
Perception in value that the clients have of a service is critical, since they might make the decision to stop using it at any given moment.
If for instance, the service you offer has a 14-day free of charge test period it is vital that the user’s Time To Value is within that period of time, so we can make sure that they will purchase the plan we are offering.
Advice for reducing Time To Value
The first step to reduce Time To Value is finding out the moment when clients realize that your product is adding them value. Once we identify that moment, we have to decide on the best route to get the customers there.
These are three tips to ease the process of improving Time To Value:
- Create user guides. A way of reducing Time To Value is by producing documentation that guides the user or clients in how to use our product. Here we may include any tip of manual or resource that might help the user, such as a Help Center with tutorials or FAQs, just like the ones you can find in UX Learn.
- Make sure the implementation is right. In more technical products, generally aimed towards B2B, it may be quite interesting to add tailor made assistance and guide the client through their first steps to make sure they have a good experience. An onboarding session could be an interesting tool that can make a difference in this case, by showing the main range of capabilities.
- Improving the UX of the product. To achieve the greatest value for the user, every element of the product (buttons, menus, instructions) need to be clear and understandable, this means, being easy to use and intuitive. To accomplish this, of course, we must carry out user tests so we understand which parts we must improve.
Conclusively, we must identify the moment which users perceive the value in our product so we can improve every process that gets them there. In that sense, knowing the phases that your clients go through when making the decision to purchase the product is very important, since it will help you optimize and enhance every process.
This article is a translation of the following one published on our corporate website:
