Part-2: Customer Experience Surveys are Futile if...
Haresh Amre
Software Delivery Improvement | Lean-Agile | Design Thinking | Delivery Excellence & Quality
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel"
- Maya Angelou
Recap of Part-1 in 70-80 words –
The beauty of the customer success concept is simplicity. Don’t overthink about it. Customer Success is when your customer achieves their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.[1]
In part-2 of the article, we explore the methods to operationalize the customer success mindset. Organizations focused on customer success need to understand customer journey and plan the activities in alignment with customer journey. Journey map is a quite useful tool to understand end-user’s journey of experiences with supplier organization’s products / services. [2] There are 5 phases of customer journey.
Anticipate –
At this phase of journey, customer is focused on defining the challenge, identifying potential solution and looking for partners who can work with them to implement the solution. The challenge can be categorized as transform, change or run the organization. Customer explores the possible solutions to transform current business, change the current ways of operations or run them optimally. They invest in the technology, business process, people capability or actionable insights from data to evolve the solution.
Successful implementation of solution and resolution of challenge should translate into financial impact. The financial impact is measured as revenue growth, margin improvement or working capital optimization. Sometimes the solution may result into non-financial impacts such as employee engagement, customer experience, regulatory compliance or impact on environment, social or governance commitment. At the anticipate stage organization focused on customer success should –
Entry –
At this phase of journey, customer and service providers are establishing commercial contract. While focusing on commercial aspect is a priority for both the entities, the supplier organization should focus on initiation, set-up and planning to provide the product / services
4.???The supplier organization should identify the core team and the seed team. These team members should continue with the engagement till foreseeable future. These teams should have capabilities for solution design (functional), program management, technical architect and program coaching. Apart from these teams also possess the relevant technical and engineering skills develop, build, integrate, test and deploy.
5.???The supplier organization should proactively understand the persona of the end-users. They should ‘go-to-gemba’ and understand the as-is way of working. Empathize with the end-users and understand their real need / challenges.
6.???The supplier organization should perform the risk assessment and plan for appropriate mitigation actions. If there are dependencies on customer then work with customer to resolve the same. Risk identification should cover customer’s business environment and priorities, input and information expected from customer, execution process, people capacity and capabilities, access to tools and utilities, engineering environment and governance.?
Explore & execute –
At the explore & execute stage, the supplier organization starts providing product / service delivery in an iterative and incremental manner. In order to ensure customer success, supplier should focus on faster time-to-value by ensuring the working software / product / systems are delivered to end-users.
7.???Conduct release planning in partnership with customer organization. Plan the set of features that need to be delivered every release. Understand the key business events those are influencing the releases. Understand the business calendar events and seasonality that may impact customer’s business priorities and plan the deliverables around them.
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8.???It is essential to provide on-going update to customers. Share the information in transparent manner. Have a focused discussion about challenges and issues in order to avoid surprises. Agree on the periodic updates and share the same as per agreed timelines. Conduct monthly and quarterly governance reviews with sponsors and key stakeholders who are interested in the business outcome.
9.???While one is focused on service delivery, communication and governance, don’t take Quality granted. Functional and non-functional quality of product is fundamental to customer success
10.???Conduct periodic review of the product along with customers and provide them the demo to get early feedback. Based on the feedback, reprioritize the features and deliverables as needed
11.???At the explore and execution stage, organization change management is a critical aspect. Sometimes the best of the solution is not adopted by the end-users as they are more worried about fear of unknown. The supplier organization should create awareness about need for the change. End-users tends to focus on benefits of current system and risk of new solution, whereas supplier is more focused on benefits of new solution and challenges of current system.?
Expand / Exit –
The supplier organization should adopt appropriate transition approaches based on expand / exit agreement established with customer. This is essential to ensure on-going success of the customer’s business operations.
12.???Deployment & data migration are critical for on-boarding the end-users to new technology solution. The supplier should ensure that all the enablement activities are completed the for end-user to start using the new platform
13.???End-user training is a key aspect to improve adoption of solution. It helps end-users to be comfortable with newer ways of working which may lead to ultimate objective of transform, change or run efficiently. Helpdesk and support are also the key to improve end-user efficiency, apart from the training. These interventions help end-users to stay focused on their key activities and priorities. Customer success will be evident when end-users feels that they are being better than yesterday as they improve the usage of the new solution.
Reflect –
The reflect stage is a critical aspect of supplier – customer relationship. If this staged is managed well then it eliminates the need for off-line customer feedback surveys. The supplier organization should perform following activities proactively to ensure on-going value realization to customer.
14.???Business value articulation about the solution and service delivery is a significantly important aspect of engagement. The supplier organization need to relate with business case of the customer’s challenge and need for the solution. They should support customer to articulate financial and non-financial impact on-going basis.
15.???Analytics and insights are essential for continuous improvement. Even the best of the solution may lose its relevance if it’s not being updated in alignment to changes in the environment. The supplier organization should provide the insights about cycle-time, cost of operations, end-user engagement, business outcome to customer organization. This opens up new opportunities and challenges, which lead to on-going relationship between the organizations.
Customer success is the foundation of life-time relationship with the customer. Life-time value of the customer may translate into multi-billion-dollar business for an organization.
No one individual has done more business with Natarajan Chandrasekaran than Mitchell Habib, who, in a career spanning a quarter century, has worked at General Electric Co., Citigroup Inc. and Nielsen Holdings Plc.
“Chandra and I have done more than $4 billion in business in over a decade we have known (each other)," Habib said days after Chandrasekaran, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) was appointed chairman of Tata Sons Ltd. [3]
References –