Customer Value Based Service Design : Identifying Revenue Opportunities within Fiber Business

Sammanfattning: This paper describes a study of revenue opportunity identification at a telecommunications company in Sweden. The study is based on a development process for creating products and services based on the customers’ needs and opinions. The background of the study is therefore customer value research in order to select a proper method for understanding the customers and to reformulate that knowledge into lucrative products and services. The study aimed at delivering concepts for new revenue opportunities in the fiber business at The Company and a recommended process for future product and service development. Throughout the study, a work process for development was implemented and evaluated in order to give useful recommendations to The Company. The study therefore includes both use of the process and refinements of the same. Identifying customers’ needs, i.e. their perceived value, was done by carrying out in -depth qualitative interviews with the chosen customer segment property owners. The needs were thereafter reformulated into products and service ideas and were limited to a desired amount by implementing various selection processes. This resulted in eight ideas that were formulated into concepts and evaluated by applying business cases. The business cases address various areas necessary for evaluating the concepts. Greatest effort was however put into the economic analyses where several assumptions were made in order to evaluate the economic gain from implementing the concepts. Conclusion from the project is that it is possible to develop lucrative products and services within fiber business based on customer value. Literature within the area states that focusing a business on customer value and customer involvement will create a competitive advantage, wherefore this approach is recommended to The Company. The developed process was customized for implementing customer value strategies at the fiber business unit at the telecommunications company and valuable recommendations were compiled to assure optimized application of the process, resulting in valuable outcomes. Keywords: revenue, customer value, telecommunication, fiber, development process