In this technological environment, everyone would agree that customer experience always has a competitive advantage and is paramount for any organisation to be successful in the marketplace.
The seamless availability of data paired with modern and digitalised ways of accessibility has made it easier for anyone to obtain data at their fingertips. Every customer not only needs efficiency but also deserves and demands customer experience. It is extremely important to the sustained growth of a business.
Anything positive in this space would lead to better marketability in the form of success stories and brand loyalty and profitability in terms of revenue generation.
As organisations transform themselves into an agile driven environment, the implementation de facto is infact not easily understood. The buzzwords around Agile are prevalent these days, but the applicability of customer experience methods and practices are something not every organisation picked up.
Let’s evaluate the buzzwords in detail to understand them more and how we can implement customer experience to it.
As everyone understands the term “agility” which is a means to achieve faster results in shorter turnaround times with no compromise to quality and better risk mitigation, when it comes to customer experience it means increasing the frequency of communications and collaborations through establishment of continuous listening, prioritisation and iterative execution methods to drive efficiency, quality and customer satisfaction.
In a way, “Agile” helps to make customer experience more effective. Increasing the frequency of communications will help to drive iterative nature of gaining customer feedback through Voice Of Customer (VOC), improved collaborations through establishment of continuous learning practices via closed loop systems and awareness of new CX tools, prioritisation and iterative execution methods through developing models to drive predictability and behavioral analysis with relative measurements for the customer would help greatly.
How do we implement customer experience in Agile driven environment?
There are 3 levels where these can be blended effectively into the current framework: strategic, tactical and operational.
When we talk about implementation, we need to talk about maturity as well. Maturity of an organisation is an extremely important aspect to consider when it comes to implementation of agile customer experience.
No matter the relative size of the organisation, the maturity scale differs in terms of where the customer is positioned currently.
How do you drive the right combination of agile customer experience with maturity?
The first thing before anyone decides to implement agile customer experience is to assess the scale of maturity of that organisation. This can be measured through plotting the customer to see which phase they fall in the scale of journey towards maturity. The phases that are relevant to maturity are:
- Initial (a.k.a current state),
- Managed (a.k.a augmented and controlled),
- Standardised (a.k.a common practices & standards),
- Optimised (a.k.a predictable) and
- Differentiator (a.k.a innovative).
The level of customer experience you implement for any organisation varies by each phase and what levers you apply to drive them from one phase of maturity to another. There is no “one size fits all” model that can be employed for this.
Some of the foundational elements are required by the organisation to go through this journey – commitment, adaptability, dedication and openness to change
There is a growing demand for early adopters who wants to harness the power of Agile and the customer centricity that can be build around that. Early strides by these companies are paying off big time and highlights customer experience in agile environments at the forefront of their success.
In the coming years, customer expectations will continue to evolve – likely faster than we ever imagined so companies that have not through this yet, will have to pick up pace faster than anticipated to stay competitive.
Interesting links:
- Managing CX When Everything Changes At The Speed of Light
- The Role of Voice-enabled Technology in Business Today