Agile practices help organizations create an adaptive, ongoing consumer-focused approach that continually allows organizations to engage consumers, gain insight from those engagements, and take action to provide increased value to the consumer and build brand loyalty in the process. Agile practices promote an empirical, adaptive approach that supports an iterative cycle of Input to Insight to Action and that process helps agile organizations create an ongoing, self-improving process for attracting, selling to, and servicing their consumers.
The Customer Journey
To show how agile organizations are better equipped to engage customers, let’s first take a closer look at some of the imperatives of good customer engagement.
Organizations that excel at customer engagement have cultures that follow four imperatives that acknowledge and embrace a shift in power to the consumer, foster an ongoing exchange of value between organization and consumer, can anticipate customer needs and proactively address them, and involve the customer in the creation of products and services.
With an understanding of what good customer engagement looks like, let’s take a look at agile organizations and why agile organizations are better positioned to excel at customer engagement.
Agile organizations are quick in anticipating and responding to changes in the market place. They bring an adaptive discipline and science to bear when considering and managing the change. They continually learn and improve through empirical and adaptive practices. Their processes are based on long-term business value and adaptation and they promote open communication, collaboration, and sharing.
Considering the four imperatives discussed in the link provided above, let’s take a look at how they align with the values and practices of agile organizations.
- Embrace the Relationship Power Shift:
Agile organizations value people and collaboration over processes and procedures. This does not mean that process doesn’t have its place, but it does mean that the primary focus is on people and in this case, the consumer.
- Anticipate Continuous Value Exchanges:
This is where agile organizations really start to excel. Agile organizations understand that an empirical, adaptive approach aligned with a vision focused on providing long-term business value through incremental results is a better and much more consumer-centered approach than an approach based on a prescriptive plan. - Provide Contextual, Effortless Interactions:
Through an empirical approach focusing on the consumer, agile organizations are able to leverage insights gained through the test-and-learn approach to proactively improve the customers experience before the consumer needs to ask. Organizations that follow a prescriptive plan and approach don’t have the benefit of these insights, simply due to the nature of their approach. - Enable Co-Creation:
Agile organizations are empirical, they continually watch and learn from consumers, and these learnings can and do influence in-flight initiatives, and the development of future products and services. A prescriptive approach, by its nature, cannot support this capability since, traditionally most if not all decisions are likely made at the start of the initiative.
Contact us to learn more, or visit our Agile Transformation Page and our Customer Engagement Page for resources and examples of our customer engagement experience. Also take a look at our Customer Engagement Blog.
