Solving your customer’s problem is no longer enough to drive sustainable results for your business. The current market trend is that consumers prefer to consume experiences rather than products per se. The product is no longer seen as an end activity but rather as a means to acquire a complete experience. This vision means that the priority of companies tends to offer services and that products become avatars, part of the services to be consumed.

From a marketing perspective, for example, in products we have 4 Ps (product, price, promotion, and place), while services marketing adds 3 more variables to its mix: People, Processes, and Physical Evidence. You have probably heard about and most likely implemented an MVP project. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, that is, the minimum the product has to offer to make an offer viable. Thinking that to achieve success and customer loyalty, your offer must expand beyond the product, a new methodology comes into play: The MVS!

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What is MVS?

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MVS stands for Minimum Viable Service. Let’s understand what each letter means?

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Minimum – Follows the same idea as Minimum in MVP. It is the minimum journey to ensure a experience of value for your customer.
Viable – Follows the same idea as Viable in MVP. It is the viability of the journey that delivers value to your customer.‍
Service – Represents the service economy – we start working with an experience, with the use and remembrance of a service and no longer a product that is produced and sold.

How to implement an MVS creation process?

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You can blend MVS methodologies with the agile methodologies already existing in your company. Following a cyclical structure, MVS can be incremental and with each iteration add more features and consequently improve your user’s experience.

The important thing is that we must understand that MVS has two fundamental phases: Humanization and Crystallization. Each of these phases comprises a series of concepts and methodologies that are applicable for creating an MVS. Let’s understand what is implemented in each of them.

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Humanization: In this phase, extensive studies are conducted with the ultimate goal of understanding the behavior, pains, and desires of your digital solution user. For this, the humanization process is divided into two stages:

Projection: The projection phase deals with deeply understanding the current behavior of your target audience and their current needs, expectations, and desires. It is in the projection phase that we seek to understand how the user solves the current pain, what alternatives they use, and whether they have expectations of change. Methodologies for the projection part include: field research, interviews with potential users, and methods to outline your target audience’s profile.
Perspectives: In this phase, we gather all the data collected in the projection phase and bring together all stakeholders to extract what would be a service of value for the mapped target audience.

Crystallization: Based on all the knowledge acquired in the humanization phase, the crystallization phase employs methodologies to create a prototype that represents the entire conception of the imagined service. The crystallization process is also divided into two stages

Playground: In this stage, we map the moments of user interaction with the service and propose solutions for each of these stages. The solution can even be a product! Notice how the product, in a service context, fits as a means but the final solution is not just a product but a logical sequence of user interactions that provide a positive experience.
Polish: This stage involves refining everything that was proposed as a solution in the playground stage and drawing a roadmap for creating each of the service stages. In this phase, we understand what are products, what are integrations, and any other solutions given in the previous stage. We then refine them so that the implementation of each stage is possible. In the case of a product, this stage may include defining an MVP as well!

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With MVS practice, your company explores the maximum potential of its product. You can go much further beyond a product and find new revenue streams and new ways to monetize your platform. MVS is user-centered and user loyalty guarantees you recurring revenue and increased competitiveness.

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MVS in a digital initialization context

For small and medium-sized companies and technology startups, the use of MVS can be of great value when designing the solution that will be offered to the market. In these cases, we must initially:

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Prove that a problem exists.
Prove that a real audience experiences this problem.
Evidence that audiences have a viable and desirable solution (for example, through prototyping, etc.)
Build an MVP to evidence that your solution to the problem is correct.

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MVS Examples

Let’s imagine a subscription service for clothing pieces. The business team abstracts the produce/sell format of a piece and transforms it into a subscription, thinking about the customer experience and loyalty. Instead of making a single sale, the subscription service rents pieces as needed and provides service for exchange and maintenance.

The benefit, besides gaining recurring revenue due to the subscription format, lies in the opportunity to generate a positive experience at various moments, with user interaction not only at the time of unit purchase but throughout the entire service delivery process, thus generating positive memories on the part of the user, in the case of adapted and assertive experiences.

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MVS Benefits

Actively determining what your solution is and testing it as a Minimum Service of Value with your customers is invaluable.

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You can enter the market quickly, affordably, and safely, without losing unnecessary time to competitors.
What better way to build relationships and gain insights than having a working relationship with your target audience.
You will be able to evolve it based on real-world experience and feedback. What customers say they want and say they will do is often very different from reality.
You will have many more insights to use when defining and designing your technology.

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Have any questions, or want to know more?

Zappts can help your company build digital products and services that take into account Service Design and development of your MVS. Since 2014, Zappts has been delivering business results through technology, delivering high-relevance cases using agile processes, best development practices and software quality, and an unparalleled ability to understand and solve the day-to-day pains of technology development projects.

We offer solutions for all phases of digital solution development, from discovery processes to solution support. With defined processes and agile management, our deliveries are always based on expectation alignment, quality, and technical robustness.

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Continue your studies, check out our material on “Service Design and MVS: Digital solutions born to retain your customer“

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