Understanding relative value and customer success
David Lovejoy is a Customer Value Manager at Ibbaka. See his Skill Profile on Ibbaka Talent.
Value is a deceptively simple word. It is usually recognized in hindsight, and only fully appreciated when absent or lost. It becomes rather complex then to accurately prescribe value in advance, yet that is precisely what interested me with Ibbaka’s design thinking approach to aligning customer value for clients. Using a powerful yet simple and scalable model to account for a variety of fluid factors and arriving at an estimated value is a point of differentiation for Ibbaka. The core of Ibbaka’s vision is to enable people and organizations to see holistically what they can offer, often with what they already possess. We do this through collaborative relationships with our customers to better understand each other and succeed together.
Perhaps it is not the most apt analogy, but as Customer Value Manager, I see my role as having a lot in common with an air traffic controller (ATC). Pilots have their hands full capably flying an airplane to the best of their abilities, but their focus is necessarily narrow, whereas the ATC has a more macro view—not only of the airspace in which the pilots are presently flying, but even more crucially—of all possible airspaces they could be flying in, and who else is occupying the airspace. This empowers the pilots to make optimal decisions to bypass turbulence, catch a tailwind, or shall we say, avoid competition. The information I gather about our clients through research, conversations, and the relationships I forge will help me to better understand their situation and goals and allow me to develop adaptive and comprehensive strategies with our talented team.
It might be interesting at this point to share a little bit about how my somewhat unorthodox background has prepared me for success at Ibbaka. I was a tour guide in Asia for a number of years, leading dozens of small groups around Japan, Vietnam, and Myanmar for weeks at a time. To consistently deliver an exemplary experience to over 1,000 clients in the midst of frequent uncertainty, I developed a system of flexible matrices to track changing goals, roles, responsibilities, and other external variables such as weather, policies, and trends across time. I liaised with offices across four continents to improve current and future products and included and empowered customers in the process. I had in-depth conversations about challenges and highlights they experienced on past tours, their ideal plans and destinations, learned about accomplishments and gleaned insights into their professions, which ran the whole gamut: law, entertainment, architecture, IT, medicine, military, and quite a bit more. This planted seeds in my mind about future services and markets we could explore, and I began reading McKinsey reports on tourism primarily, but also adjacent industries, had late-night conversations with smarter people than myself, and even gave a few lectures at corporate and government seminars, which contributed, in small part at least, to a policy shift towards ethical tourism. Eventually, I drew up a business plan to expand into new countries, beginning with South Korea. The company liked my idea and built upon it, moving into all of Asia. However, in the lead-up to the Olympics, just as the busiest tourist season in Japanese history was about to get underway, the industry came to a screeching halt with the arrival of COVID.
I enjoyed the virtuous cycle of constantly growing and helping others make an impact and I wanted to become more effective at it, so I transitioned into an MBA and began working in management consulting. My first engagement was a go-to-market strategy for a SaaS company, which blossomed into many more projects, leading to Ibbaka. What I am looking to apply to this role is my innate curiosity and motivation, combined with a continued embrace of cross-pollination to create synergies between our impressive team and yours. In support of this aim, I am currently taking design thinking courses at IDEO U and IE Business School, as well as a pricing strategy course with HEC Paris. The culture at Ibbaka is one of perpetual learning, and colleagues are eager to share resources they find useful—I have already received three books to support my journey, perhaps I will write a review in my next blog post.
