With understanding the whole life cycle of a customer being the most important goal for businesses to optimize themselves in today’s competitive business environment, a full life cycle use case gives a detailed outline from the customer journey’s awareness phase to the point where a customer makes a repeat purchase. This article will explain the importance of a full life cycle use case, the putsteps of each and how it can assist your business strategy.

Key Note #1: What is a Full Life Cycle Use Case?

A full life cycle use case captures the customer’s entire experience with a product or service and is broken down into components that indicate how well the product is satisfying their needs. This full life cycle can be divided into several stages:

How to find the customer?

How to deliver the product to the customer?

How does the customer utilizes the product?

Does the customer appreciate and accept the product?

Does the customer intend to purchase the product again?

Does the customer recommend the product to others?

In order to grasp better your customer’s disposition, primary research needs to be done. Primary research is more than simply looking at an internet survey or an industry report. It includes interviews, direct surveys, focus groups, and any method that can provide insightful information from the respondents.

A use case is about tracing the steps of a customer who discovers your product, interacts with it, and concludes whether or not it satisfies their needs. This journey can be broken down into three stages:

Pre-Acquisition: What are your methods of contacting a customer?

During-Acquision: In what way does the customer engage with your product, and does it serve its purpose?

Post-Acquisition: Will the customer purchase again and spread word about your product?

Recognizing these stages is very important because that helps in making strategic business choices aimed at achieving your product’s goals and overall success.

The Importance of the Full Life Cycle Use Case for Business Strategy

Use cases with full life cycles are a critical part of your business model because they detail the customer experience. After you outline the entire experience, you will be able to make better decisions for important factors of your business such as:

Go-to-market strategy: How do you intend to reach your customers?

Pricing framework: What is the best price for your product?

Unique Selling Proposition (USP): What is the unique feature of your product?

Positioning: What do other competitors say about your product?

Product growth plan: How will your product change over time based on customer demand?

When you know and comprehend your customer’s journey deeply, you can build your product to provide maximum value to the customer, which increases its probability of success. Ignoring full life cycle mapping, on the other hand, leads to scarce resources and endless shifts that hinder your product from being launched and grown.

Example: Creating a Product Around A Use Case Of Cycle Life Abuse

As an illustration, let’s take the case of creating a platform that allows users to search for houses to rent. The primary steps an average customer goes through can be summarized as follows.

The customer is looking for rental houses on the internet and filters results by location, budget, and other preferences.

The customer then contacts several landlords based on the search results, and schedules property visits.

If you want to be competitive, your platform has to enhance and facilitate this journey. For instance, your platform can provide advanced search options, comprehensive property details, and even enable easy contact with the landlords.

The platform will be preferred by customers over others if it adds value to their experience—making it simple to search for and contact the properties. In addition, if the customers are satisfied with the seamless experience, they might want to use the platform themselves even if they do not close a deal, and recommend it to others instead.

Key Note #2: 10 Steps Of A Full Cycle Life Use Case

The full life cycle use case can be summarized in the following ten activities:

Customer Knowledge: The first step to be taken is accepting that there is a problem to be solved. Focus at this stage is important because it creates an opportunity with your product’s offering and defines problem it is intended to solve.

Finding Your Product/Service: Customers should never struggle to find your product at this stage. This is when your go-to marketing strategy comes into action. It is working perfectly to gather potential customers.

Analyze Your Product/Service: Customers should know how your product works and what value it brings. Detailed analysis of your products as compared to competing ones helps define an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

Acquire & Pay for the Product/Service: The focus here is on the customer’s buying behavior. Making sense of your pricing tactics and how the product gets distribution greatly improves this step.

Install Your Product/Service: If it requires integration, ensuring that customers can do so with ease is crucial to their satisfaction.

Use Your Product/Service: Customers begin to use the product when it is their turn to solve a problem with it. This is a key moment to see if the product really meets their needs.

Determine Value Gained from Product/Service: While using a product, customers verify if they are receiving the promised value. This traces customer satisfaction and whether your product is able to address their pain points.

Receive Support for Your Product/Service: Customer care is crucial. Giving genuine support, either by a bot or a real person, greatly boosts the customer’s experience.

Purchase More Products/Services: The main aim is to convert customers into loyal buyers. To achieve this, you need to keep your customers engaged and satisfied.

Generate Buzz for Your Service: If your customers are satisfied enough, they will make recommendations to other people, increasing your customer base with little marketing effort.

Full Life Cycle Use Case Real World Examples

1. Netflix

Netflix example success is a textbook demonstration of full life cycle use case. Here is how they did it:

Customer Awareness: Customers learned of Netflix’s services from clips shown during films and TV shows or from online marketing.

Finding the Product: Customers realized that it was so easy to get their favorite movies.

Analyze Product: Customers appreciated the ability to stream premium entertainment content on demand.

Acquisition & Payment: With Netflix subscribing was very easy, payment is done online and there is a click for free trial.

Using Product: Users have easy access to their preferred movies, shows, etc.

Value Gained: Customers were glad to get numerous content and diversified upon as well as tailored recommendations.

Support: Customers access various support services offered by Netflix via their website and application.

Reorder: Netflix subscribers continually paid for the service and a number of them migrated to higher subscription tiers.

Spread Awareness: Satisfied clients propagated the use of Netflix leading to further growth.

2. Fillbee

A furniture marketplace company called Fillbee noted a stressed pain point — customers complaining about furniture which could not fit into their homes. Their solution was the full lifecycle use case:

Design. Customers would upload photos of the room and its dimensions and visualize whether the furniture would fit.

Furnishing. Fillbee went a step further and offered customers a selection of brands. Moreover, customers were able to drag and drop furniture into the photograph of the room.

Collaboration. Family members or interior designers could be consulted and provided advice regarding the best furniture for the room.

Purchase. Purchasing was made easy through discounts and straightforward checkout processes.

Reorder. Satisfied customers came back to Fillbee.

Conclusion

Implementing full life cycle use cases is critical in understanding your customer’s journey and optimizing their experience with your product at all levels. By accurately mapping this cycle, your business is able to modify its strategy ranging from first knowing their problem, to using your product, and finally recommending it to others.

Creating or changing an existing product? A full life cycle use case will always aid in making educated choices and assure that your product delivers value. Tracking product usage isn’t sufficient. You need to figure out how to get to the customers, provide a solution, and keep them interested. Putting the customer life cycle into consideration in designing your product puts you in a better place for the future.