Make the small steps count in your customer experience strategy
The best advancements in customer experience don’t always come in giant rollouts. Slalom expert Malek Tayara explores why leading companies succeed through smaller, continuous evolutions.
I was shopping around for intake vents last week — and, before you stop reading there, I promise this story about home repair has a point.
First I went to a nearby big box hardware store, only to find that they did not have the vents I needed in stock. However, I was told that a store 30 minutes away had them.
So, what did I do? I pulled up my phone, bought my vents off Amazon, and used the extra 60 minutes that I’d just saved driving to have a nice lunch at a local restaurant.
Is this a familiar story for most people? Yes — and that’s just my point. Amazon provided me with an easy experience to find the exact products I was looking within minutes. It was delivered to my address fast and exactly when I needed it. Chances are that you’ve got a similar story in your recent past, too.
My Amazon experience was made possible by small evolutions to the Amazon services, the kind that you do not always hear about in the news. This includes constant evolution of their user experience to find the right product for you, product inventory, and shipping speed. Of course, big events like the acquisition of Whole Foods or the introduction of Prime Membership are important — they are large long-term strategic moves.
Today I want to focus on smaller, ongoing, bottoms-up shifts in experiences that are essential for personalized, user-friendly experiences. Ultimately, these smaller evolutions may enable a customer to find a product, fulfill it, and have it delivered it within a day — but you gotta start somewhere.
How to lead — and not just play catch-up
As a side effect of my Amazon experience, now I expect that same level of service from all my online vendors. Amazon’s commitment to continuous evolution keeps its competitors in a catch-up mode versus a leading position.
If companies want to lead, they need to embrace change and develop a workforce, processes, and technologies that allow them to continually evolve. Here are some areas to think about to create an organization where evolution is the norm:
1. Enable your people to define the evolution.
Many organizations approach an evolution strategy with a singular focus on big, multi-year projects. Consequently, they spend several months creating strategies and roadmaps. Strategies are important — however, it’s easy to spend too much time developing strategies and not enough time executing towards your goal.
Instead, set your organization’s direction, announce it and then just allow your employees to start heading towards this direction. For example, instead of spending six or more months laying out a strategy on how to become more customer-centric, tell employees that you want to become more customer-centric and let them start thinking through and executing on ideas.
Instead of spending six or more months laying out a strategy on how to become more customer-centric, tell employees that you want to become more customer-centric and let them start thinking through and executing on ideas.
You don’t have to stop planning the large-scale strategies during this time, either. And you’ll benefit from the collective brain power of the full organization, which almost always results in new innovative ideas that a smaller group of strategist haven’t considered.
2. Celebrate failure. For real.
Continuous improvement requires an inquisitive culture. Everyone in your organization should be encouraged to question the status quo and think through solutions to improve it. Failure should be celebrated just as much as wins are.
Easier said than done, though. Responsibility falls to leaders to foster this curiosity and support allocating time for their people to do the same. When things don’t go as planned, your management should ask, “What did you learn?” and “Why haven’t you failed enough this quarter?” versus “Did you meet your timeline or sales numbers?”
It sounds counter-intuitive, but if you create a culture of high-performing, inquisitive people, revenue and timeline commitments follow. Bringing transformative ideas to life requires time and testing — the kind of work often done through small, frequent iterations.
3. Focus on products, not “projects.”
A project implies that there is a beginning and an end. In order to continuously evolve every part of your business, technology needs to continuously evolve with you. Your systems and implementations that support your business should be referred to as products with “sprints” referring to work happening on the product. All products should have a product plan that gets updated regularly and includes smart innovative ideas. This of course does not apply for products you want to retire. Sometimes products do not make sense for the organization after a certain period of time. These products need to be identified and an end date set for them. All products have a lifecycle in some form or other. Any product that does not have a product plan that is being worked on should be considered an obsolete product and you should focus on planning its retirement.
4. Create a nimble technology platform.
This is a board statement that can be hard to define. To me, a “nimble” technology is a technology that gives as much control as possible to the person leveraging it and empowers them to implement their ideas.
As you develop solutions for your products, think through what offers your consumers the best self-service opportunities so that the IT organization is seen as a business enabler versus a bottleneck. Here are two strategies to consider when examining your technology solutions:
a. Enable self-service cloud operations: Starting out a new product frequently requires the engagement of the infrastructure team and a setup of multiple infrastructure environments. Setting up these environments can be time consuming and costly. Your organization’s internal infrastructure team should focus on leveraging the cloud and creating DevOps code and standards to enable the developers to setup and run their own environments in minutes versus weeks. Additionally, this will allow the infrastructure team to focus on innovation versus tasks that can be automating by levering the cloud.
b. Leverage tools with out-of-the-box capabilities: Leveraging leading software products can help make it easier for you to evolve as most of this type of software has a strategic roadmap that you can leverage when introducing new functionality with every release. Allow the business to do experience updates by doing simple configuration changes to those tools.
In some cases, you may decide to custom-build unique solutions for your organization. When you do, make sure that the architecture is built in a way to allow for re-use across your organization.
We live in exciting times. Change is scary — it inherently requires risk — but if you put the right foundations in place to support it, continuous evolution becomes a way of being that your organization can embrace.
Change is scary — it inherently requires risk — but if you put the right foundations in place to support it, continuous evolution becomes a way of being that your organization can embrace.
Most importantly, continuous evolution sets you up to lead your industry instead of always trying to catch up. To create a long-term, sustainable environment, these changes must start with your people, be enabled by technology, and be supported by continuous evolution process.
Malek Tayara is a digital strategy leader with Slalom Chicago who brings over 25 years of experience in transforming businesses across multiple industries.
Slalom Customer Insight is created by industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.
