Agile CX

Nov 29, 2021

 

The way organizations execute projects has changed over time. Customers need solutions to their problems faster than ever. Irrespective of the industry, agile practices are adopted to manage projects.

 

Implementing CX is no different. The sooner we know the customer's problem, the faster we need to solve it. It is the best experience we give to the customers. Agile plays a vital role here.

 

We define agile CX as providing timely and effective solutions to customer problems. It involves listening to customers and providing timely solutions in an empathetic way. Technology plays a vital role in implementing agile CX. Let us discuss a few topics in the coming weeks.

One of the approaches I have been part of was a proactive exercise of improving customer experience. Customer journey maps are the basis for this approach. Before getting into the agile CX, Let us have a quick look at the basic structure of agile methodologies.

In an agile methodology, the effort/project is broken down into themes, epics, stories, and tasks. Customer journeys are broken down into sub journeys as well due to the complexity of the business. This would become a perfect match where agile can help improve CX.

The approach we have taken was as below:

  • Consider journey phases as key themes
  • Objectives within each phase as epics
  • Similar customer issues within an epic as stories and
  • Stories are broken down into tasks to be executed.

 


This approach helped us keep things easy to focus on, and different teams worked in parallel on different customer phases to reduce the time to address the entire journey.

Where to start with agile in CX is a question I frequently get. The best way is, to begin with transactional survey data. All companies which adopt CX have data from surveys. Take data for a quarter or two and identify an improvement opportunity. Do not worry about themes, epics, and tooling at this stage. For the improvement opportunity, select a customer or two and a team that works on the improvement. The best is to request the customer as part of the team.

Now meet with the team, analyze the issue and identify the improvement activities to be performed. Estimate the effort and decide on a weekly sprint or a biweekly sprint. Now Group the activities into stories and tasks and assign them to the team. Meet daily to discuss the status. Use existing project planning tools or even spreadsheets to track the status.

This is one of the simplest ways to start introducing agile to CX, and once we have small success stories, we will get buy-in from management for budgets to scale up agile infrastructure.