The importance of customer experience has increase over the last year as offerings are becoming more and more personalized and easy. In the past you had to go to a movie rental shop to choose one out of thousands of options, today streaming apps will already suggest what you should watch based on your previous behaviour. Same thing will happen on online stores, music streaming apps, social media and so on.
All products, especially digital, are created and designed to provide the best experience. These optimizations that aim to help the customer on their journey, improve the usability of the products and increase the chances of conversion are also known as UX Design.
User experience or customer experience, together with product managers and engineers, will help determine where on the customer journey are the key point of contact and provide solutions to improve the customer experience. In the previous example, these companies learned that, by offering a personalized experience, the customer had more chances of finding something they like, thus performing the desired action.
The Customer has the power
As the number of options increases, the customer gains more power over his choice. If certain product does not meet their requirements or does not provide a pleasant experience, they will change to your competitor. Fidelity is hard to achieve and customers are always looking for the option that will provide the most advantages.
With this change in dynamics between company and customer, we can observe a couple important consequences:
- Pretty much anyone can launch an app or a website. The requirements to launch a business are easily achievable, reason why the number of competitors in the same industry have rapidly increased. With this, companies are finding harder and harder to differentiate themselves only with their products. They are now fighting to provide the best experience, which includes everything that happens before and after the conversion.
- As customers and the market quickly change, customer experience efforts cannot stand still. They will have to be flexible to continuously be a competitive advantage. Otherwise, your competitors will always win.
How can Agile development help me on my digital Customer Experience?
Previous improvements in internal and external processes took a long time to be planned and launched. Companies would take months or even years to implement any changes, which was accepted when the market was not so competitive. Now it is a different story. While you are planning your improvement, your customer has already scaped.
Agile development provides mental models adapted to the digital world we live in today. It provides companies with a flexible, fast, and efficient way to develop improvements on their digital products, meeting the requirements of the fast-paced markets they are in. With this agile development mindset, your company can become more adaptable, less bureaucratic, and more susceptible to changes, everything the market desires and looks for in a digital product.
How to apply Agile development to my digital Customer Experience efforts?
First, before jumping ahead and designing solutions, you must properly map the problem and take care of one problem at a time. Traditional product improvements would try to correct many problems at once, extending the process. By mapping the customer journey, determining where improvements are needed and quickly handling each one at a time, you will be able to measure the results of that single change and observe the user response.
Be flexible for change by breaking the process in smaller pieces, or sprints. If for some reason the solution you launched has not been well received by the user, you can quickly respond to that by performing another sprint. And again, and again, until the solution is exactly the way your customers want. And after that, you can move on to the next problem.
By applying Sprints, you can develop MVPs (minimum viable products) instead of spending months preparing a five-start solution you are not even sure is what your customer is looking for. Besides saving money and time, sprints offer consistent cycles with predictable results, thus reducing the chances error and improving the team’s productivity.
A few tech companies are now adapted to that reality and offer Sprint service to match the need of digital products improvements, check it out here.
Include the customer in your process. By following the previous points, this will come naturally. Remember you are changing or improving your digital customer experience. Who better to provide valuable insights than the customer himself? Customers, or their subconscious actions, are the most important source of information.
Agile development is the perfect fit for the present and future of digital customer experience. This collaborative methodology brings together different areas of the company, creating a multi-disciplinary solution. Instead of thinking that something needs to be done, you will know exactly where touch, through valuable customer insights.
If you are not sure agile development will be a fit for your business, send your contact here and together we will find the best solution for you next customer experience project!