Johannesburg, 23 Mar 2015
Organisations are increasingly adopting an agile approach and realising the importance of putting customers at the centre of decision-making. It's not news that agile and customer experience management (CEM) are what everyone is talking about right now. Even though both 'philosophies' are independent, there are a lot of synergies that exist between the two. Why are they being adopted into organisations independently?
Both CEM and agile are easily understood conceptually, but are extremely difficult to implement. With regards to CEM, what does it mean to be truly customer-centric? What does it mean to be truly outside-in? How do you make the customer the centre of your universe? Similar to agile, this is a mindset and philosophy. It is a culture change that needs to be in the DNA of the organisation. Agile helps organisations constantly innovate, respond faster to customer needs, and retain the flexibility to troubleshoot problems as they arise, but sometimes understanding what those needs are is misunderstood
It is vital to ensure the right product is being built correctly and released early to allow for early customer feedback. "Often, we've seen products/software solutions being built with little defects using the right standards and using agile (delivering working software frequently), but then once it is operationalised, we see the uptake or usage of the new product as being really poor. The question that remains: does the product really provide a successful customer outcome?" asks Biase De Gregorio, managing executive (relationship leader) at IQ Business.
What CEM allows us is to understand what the successful customer outcome truly is? What is true north? What makes the product and the complete experience successful? It also allows us to understand the entire process that the end-customer is experiencing and determine what the moments of truth are and where breakpoints exist (ie, where things can potentially go wrong). Once this is understood, the process is optimised and continually evaluated to ensure you are building the right process and resulting product.
The other aspect that is critical is understanding who your customer actually is. Most people that are adopting agile are typically from IT, and when I ask them the question: "Who is your customer?" nine times out of 10, the answer is: "business". This is incorrect; the real answer is: the end-user - the person who will ultimately use the product. We then need to understand what is valuable to them and prioritise the work accordingly. CEM allows us to understand who the customer actually is, as well as what they expect from the product and process. Therefore, the product owner in an agile team can focus on building features that meets the expectations of those who matter.
To conclude, organisations should not be adopting agile and CEM as the outcome. These are just enablers to achieve the ultimate outcome in what CEM calls the triple crown: reducing costs, improving revenue and improving customer satisfaction. Ultimately, combining agile and CEM is extremely powerful in ensuring you are delivering the right product faster.
To hear more about the importance of understanding customer experience management and how it aligns to using an agile approach when building valuable products, attend the ITWeb Software Development Management (SDM) Conference, where Biase De Gregorio will be presenting. Join the groups Agility@IQ and CEM@IQ on LinkedIn or follow @agilityiq on Twitter.
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