Delivering a great Customer Experience transformation programme is more important than ever to make the right decisions, achieve results, remain competitive and resilient.
When it comes to implementing CX transformations, we have proven time and again to excel and exceed our clients’ expectations, having won several CX transformations awards in the past. In this article, we explore 5 magic ingredients from our previous CX programme successes to apply to your own delivery programmes:
- Bring the vision & purpose to life
Many programmes have a vision. The secret is to make it more than just words on a slide. Bringing a vision to life makes it something the team can really understand and get behind, increasing motivation and innovation. This can be achieved in a few ways:
- Create an interactive prototype: Previously, we have brought in leading design agencies to create fully ‘clickable’ prototypes. Making an interactive prototype available to everyone on the programme and beyond ensures stakeholders can get really feel something tangible quickly, and encourages them to get behind the transformation.
- Promoting the programme: Before a project would fully start, we have commissioned promotional videos. Doing so provides the full context of the vision and purpose in an exciting and energising way, promotes the programme, and gets people interested.
- Keep reiterating the vision: On one project, a client’s Chief Product Owner suggested we should all get a ‘team tattoo’ of the vision so we wouldn’t forget it… He wasn’t seriously suggesting a trip to the tattoo parlour but this was a pictorial way of presenting the vision! Constantly sharing and adapting the vision ensures it is certainly never forgotten.
All of this results in something unexpected; an incredibly strong sense of purpose for the entire team. By bringing the vision to life, for your people, they can feel part of something epic. It drives commitment from the whole team and encourages them to work their socks off, whether they are a client employee, part of a consultancy, an independent contractor, or otherwise.
- Adopt a customer led design
Let the customer do the talking. Keep them at the forefront during design and build, then validate with them once built. As with anything, there are pitfalls to avoid as occasionally the customer isn’t always right in spite of having the best intentions.
With the right interpretation of customer led design, prioritisation of features can be driven by what the customer really wants, and how many of them want it. This also minimises the amount of internal politics to navigate when deciding how to order the backlog and build the end product. Once built, this delivers results and, in our experience, these results have often exceeded the majority of set success criteria. Often we see organisations making decisions based on a compromise of different opinions which ultimately delivers none of the benefits of any single view. Our approach at Clarasys avoids this danger by ensuring that the customer will receive a benefit.
To learn more about customer led design thinking, check out a summary of our blog on the double diamond.
- Use the Agile Manifesto
Take it back to the basics. Programmes often use Scrum and therefore claim to be agile but don’t see the increased velocity and quality they expected. They are likely to be suffering from the simple mistake of ignoring the core principles of the Agile Manifesto:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
While there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more, forming the foundations of our Clarasys Agile Methodology (CAM).
We take the principles of the Agile Manifesto and CAM to heart – on a two year CX transformation project, though we matured over those two years, the early days were all about individuals building working software that could be tested with customers, as soon as possible. Everything else was secondary. We were comfortable with rapidly adapting and changing the backlog priority as and when we needed to.
In contrast, many agile programmes try to agree a fixed scope with suppliers, consisting of a lengthy scoping phase and individual sizing of user stories. This is slow, demotivating and often doesn’t save on the unexpected costs it intends to avoid. When teams are inspired and trusted to deliver, the velocity and quality of work rises.
- Create autonomy and focus
Creating autonomy and focus is something for leaders to apply to their leadership style: Split up the product into different features, then give each ‘feature team’ the full autonomy to scope, prioritise and build the feature. Once the ‘feature teams’ are set up and running, senior leadership can protect the teams from any politics and bureaucracy that might arise, and promote their successes. Without the usual distractions, ‘feature teams’ are free to focus on building a high-quality product in rapid time.
- Celebrate team successes
In finding and celebrating something a team has done well, it inspires them to continue to push boundaries. The focus is less on celebrating an ideal organisational chart or a brilliant project governance model, but is more about team and people-oriented successes: successful projects are more about motivated, passionate and happy people who work together in an empowered manner; this subsequently creates a virtuous spiral both for employees and customers.
If you would like to discuss further how we can help you build an award-winning culture and CX transformation programme, please do get in touch, or apply to one of our free CX workshops.
