How your business can benefit from an agile customer experience

Businesses must constantly evolve and advance their capabilities to improve customer experiences and efficiencies. Most of the time, such changes take months or even years to implement. However, the traditional approach to implementing changes in organizations has been slow-paced, taking months or even years to implement. The emergence of agile customer experience has changed that.

The ability to adapt faster, evolve work methodologies, and upgrade processes isn’t an option anymore: it's an absolute necessity. So how can you start cultivating an agile customer experience in your organization?

What is agile customer experience?

Agile customer experience is a methodology that allows organizations to quickly and flexibly respond to customer feedback, needs, and expectations. It aims to deliver value to customers efficiently and swiftly, through frequent interventions and collaboration across all teams. Agile customer experience goes beyond just making quick fixes for customer pain points. Instead, it is a continuous process that involves small trials and experiments that can be quickly implemented and tested. Its goal is to achieve a sustainable and long-lasting impact on customer experience.

Businesses practicing agile customer experience continuously listen to their customers and adapt accordingly. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, online retail company Zappos revamped its customer service line and informed its customers that they could call to chat about anything. This pivot, at a time when Zappos’ customer service call volume was down and many people had limited in-person human contact, helped the company’s customers and agents build human connections and strengthened customers’ loyalty.

How can your company adopt an agile customer experience approach?

Set the example at the leadership level

Leadership buy-in is critical in driving agile customer experience approaches from the top down. To create a culture of agility, leaders must first set a clear vision and establish agile values across the organization, ensuring that all levels of the business are aligned with the end goal. Leaders must also create an environment of experimentation and learning, where teams feel comfortable testing new ideas and adapting to changes. When leaders can foster a culture that empowers and motivates employees, it promotes collaboration and ensures the organization can swiftly respond to customer needs. 

Amazon is a great example of a company that demonstrates this approach. After discovering that their decision-making processes were becoming inefficient and bogged down by large committees, their leadership introduced "two-pizza teams": small, cross-functional teams that can be assembled and dismantled as needed. This has helped the company stay close to customers and move faster in their decision-making, iterating existing services to meet customer needs and experimenting with new ideas on their customers’ behalf.

Embrace a test-and-learn culture

For agile to be successful, frequent interventions and collaboration across all teams are necessary, as well as an agreed-upon test-and-learn culture. Agile CX goes far deeper than executing quick fixes. In fact, performing quick fixes to appease customers who provided feedback or suggestions might not greatly impact CX in the long run. An agile approach to CX requires implementing small changes that, when integrated, can have a cumulative big impact on customers.

To implement an agile customer experience, it’s important to perform small trials and experiments, observe the results of those experiments, and make decisions based on data. If your CX is agile, the improvements are relatively easy to implement and the benefits can be seen immediately. Rather than spending months or years on all-encompassing customer transformation programs, businesses can make frequent small changes and improvements. This approach improves customer experience and helps companies stay ahead of the competition.

Share voice-of-the-customer insights

Agile businesses prioritize customer-centricity. And that means businesses must continuously listen to their customers across channels, extract insights from their voice-of-the-customer data, and share those insights with the decision-makers who can act on them. 

The best way to accomplish this is to use conversation intelligence software to analyze conversation data across your channels (phone calls, chat, service tickets, customer reviews, etc.) and surface insights. Tethr, for example, is a conversation intelligence solution that makes it incredibly easy to combine CX insights from conversation data with operational and outcome data in other systems, allowing teams to nail down the highest sources of customer frustration and effort with insights that can be immediately acted upon.

How your business can benefit from an agile customer experience

An agile customer experience model provides a framework for quickly responding to customer needs and expectations, allowing businesses to stay ahead of the competition. The more practice an organization gets at delivering an agile customer experience, the better prepared it will be to handle changing priorities in the future. Agile CX can also help companies manage their resources more efficiently, reduce operational costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

Change is the only constant. The most successful businesses are the ones that embrace change and implement an agile customer experience model. By prioritizing customer-centricity, encouraging collaboration across departments, and delivering value to the customer efficiently and effectively, businesses can thrive as conditions–and their customers’ needs–evolve.